Interview with Mikolaj Pawlowski, City Interactive Lead Level Designer

City Interactive is another Polish company I had the opportunity to interview. They are very large, and focus on games ranging from flying games, to a very popular first person shooter called Sniper. They are about to release sniper 2… I had the opportunity to interview Nikoli Pablovski who worked with this company for many years and is their lead level designer.

So what is it that you do?


I am the lead level designer; I am managing a team of level designers, but we are also rather like scripters as level designers, we also focus on things like the visual design, but mostly we are making the script in the game; we are putting AI, any scripted action; explosives to be final to the game.


Ok, how would you design around the NPC in a game? I mean obviously you say you work with AI


And the design itself as well…


Yeah, well through making the level design, how would you make the characters and the level design work together? What are some of the things you consider?


It’s about the engine really, we need to make events, and connections between any logic; if the character comes from over here (points to a side) the character will make an animation like this… and if he is over here and the player is here he will behave like that….


So it is quiet cinematic?


No, no, no, not always. You can have an AI like, actually I don’t know, to be honest there is no AI in any game, all of them are scripted, so it actually depends how you call it… so you need to design how they will behave on different events, so you need to prepare them for bullet rain, sounds near their head, footsteps, or any other ideas… how they will behave, so wright a script in our case allows the AI to start to work. We are putting as well for example, cooperative animations, other stuff like random behaviors, random animations aligned with random locations and objectives, or for things like ladders and gameplay elements that you need to figure out… Heavy machine gun stands and most the elements that the game allows you to use.


Yeah, and what do you think a good level design can achieve? What are the main criteria’s and things you try to do when you make a level? Like the aspirations or things you want to get at when you design a level?


To me, honestly, the battlefield… a “real” battlefield, it’s kind of tricky when you have lots of AI’s and they need to behave properly with each other. Some are friendly, some are hostile, and they are not supposed to take you, as the player, as the main target always. This is the basic problem with all of the games really, that the player is the main object to shoot at for the AI’s but still to have a “real” battlefield, you need to have the soldiers choosing their targets properly, “this is a hostile so I need to shoot him first!” or “this is a player, why to shoot him? He is a hostile like the others… he is not closer so I nead to shoot the closer guy…” But still the main problem with games is that they are starting to be shorter, and easier. I am a hardcore gamer so it’s starting to be annoying really…


Out of curiosity are you approaching this as more of a sandbox approach where you have an open level, or is it more linear and scripted, or somewhere in between?


Something in between, some of the elements are sandbox, others are more linear… You know you need to have what we call the “logic gates” to close the environment, to reload it from the memory of the console, so that it can be better graphics and that kind of thing. You need to put those logic gates when you need to wait for a guy or you need to be there and then you will have a cooperative animation, and that you cannot go back, just because of the performance.


Yeah, I find that in sniper, because it’s a sniping game. The level design is quite different because the terrains are so vast.


This is the biggest issue, probably, there are no other games, like that and the biggest issue is that you need to have life in this area also where the enemy is. Normally, its quiet easy, you just run and gun, with close combat, the guys can be dumb, really, they just need to shoot. But in the big distances you need to script them or make them behave properly for a much more…


Large environment…


Yeah, large environment and still they need to do something… until you shoot! So, it’s a challenge, really… because they need to repair a car or something, they need to do something in the environments, they need to live in those areas as you are watching them.


And I guess in this game this is important, because you can revisit the same spaces quite often that you can walk backwards and forwards in the same space, so you want to keep it alive. It’s not like in Doom, where you just keep going and keep going, here you can go back…


Yeah, you can revisit everything so…


It has to be kept alive


Yeah, this is the biggest challenge…