Blazej: My first impression of Night City's urban layout was the similarity to real city plans. However, we are dealing with an environment that is very special. How does one design a dystopian city? Was the starting point a "good city" that degraded or was it supposed to be "bad" from the beginning?
Jula: Let's start with the fact that the design of the city was handled by a very large group of people. We had several districts, and each district had its own chief designer. This designer interacted with the urban planner, who had a decisive voice in coordinating, delineating key elements. The city grew in parallel, so to speak.
It can be said that the hierarchy of design was ordered from macro- to micro-scale. Main roads, local roads, pedestrian and road routes were delineated. The most important buildings were laid out because they had to be subordinate to the story we wanted to tell.
So it's not quite like creating completely from scratch. On a seemingly blank sheet of paper, things like the story layer, the objects that support the story, the distances needed to, for example, go from one area to another and have a different level atmosphere must appear right away. All these things appear, they are like a series of puzzles, elements that depend on each other, you have to put them together properly.
We very often moved certain districts so that the distances between them would be adjusted according to the time the player moves from one point to another. Knowing that the player's concentration decreases after a certain time, we had to speed up the way of moving or shorten the route. There are quite a few restrictions, but they are quite different than when creating settlements in the real world. While in the real world you strive to make things better, more comfortable, friendly to the viewer or inhabitant, when designing a game environment out of dense urban structures we very often deliberately create the opposite effect - uncomfortable, unpleasant, creating a feeling of danger. With full deliberation. For a creative person with architectural and urban planning knowledge, this is something wonderful, because one should do both "good" and "bad" things, because everything is needed.
The design of the gates to the city - variants of juxtaposition that create different aesthetic forms - local landscape elements that support the orientation in the environment (Dying Light I)
fig: © Jula Arendt
Blazej: We already know what the city design process looks like. But what about the buildings? We can imagine that the hundreds of objects that make up its structure are optimized. They constitute a kind of "prefabricated" buildings.
Jula: The games that are produced nowadays tend to be very visually rich. We are striving to have more and more "open world" games. The problem is that hardware has its limitations. We can't create an environment where every object is designed individually, because the engine won't be able to render that.
This iswhere the topic of optimization comes in. Everything must be made from modules. Modules not only allow us to reduce the number of elements in relation to the variety of their combinations, but also provide flexibility in design. The design we make today may change tomorrow, because someone may create a very cool story that requires modification of the environment. And if we don't have the ability to cut out elements and insert them in a different layout, it prevents us from changing and improving the quality of the world. We have to be flexible right from the design stage.
It's funny, because when I look back on it, I see that my diploma was based on the modular use of chessboard design elements. So I was already thinking about modularity, repetition.
Blazej: So again there are strong connections between architecture and video games. This time at the level of form-building philosophy.
Jula: I faced this already with my first games. Then I worked intensively on it with Dying Light. Our team tried for six months to create one street with two building frontages. With a very warm, eastern, exotic atmosphere. We had one brilliant street, which unfortunately couldn't be duplicated anywhere else, because it was very distinctive. Then the problem arose - if we have to create a whole city, we can't go down this road, because we'll be doing it for the next thirty years. That's when I started thinking about how we can use the repetition of shapes that are present in architecture. Architecture is mathematical. Then, of course, there's the destruction [Dying Light is a game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world - note B.C.]. resulting from the material and what caused them. But the geometry itself, the rhythms and repetition of shapes are mathematical. How to use these rules to create something optimal? My team and I came up with a method - we drew sections of elevations on white pieces of paper and looked at the minimum number of shapes, such as a wall with a window, a wall with a door and the like, so that we could build as many different elevations as possible. We sat at a table and arranged these pieces of paper. A very primitive way of working for video games [laughs]! It turned out that we were able to do the whole city on just over twenty basic shapes. All the buildings, all the neighborhoods.
Dying Light I - principles of creating landscape elements in a city structure - variety of proportions,
silhouettes and compositions with a minimum number of modules
Fig: © Jula Arendt
Blazej: Standardization of production. Modernist architects like it!
Jula: This is something completely different from a typical architectural project in the normal world. You have to be fully aware that the geometry you create has to serve a specific effect. And we're not talking about mental comfort, ergonomics, but gameplay issues. Acutally, in the case of Dying Light, we had parkour, running on walls and ceilings. The geometry had to support that. If at a certain point the architecture you create doesn't support the story line or the gameplay line, it means it was done wrong.
Blazej: So we can say that the golden rule of "form follows function" still applies, only that the function is playability?
Jula: At the same time, the function changes depending on the type of game. If we have a shooter - there will be different geometry; if we are racing on the streets - different. Also if we have a hack and slash game. It changes a lot. And if there are new things in the course of the game, for example, a grappling hook that was thrown out and you could climb a rope, it changes all the widths of the streets for us and the elements that were staged on those streets.
Blazej: It seems a bit more complicated than designing a small street in a residential area.
Jula: Yes. On a housing estate, you don't have to adjust the shape of the curbs to the way the zombie guts line up on them.
Blazej: You said you were delighted that the results of your work were immediately visible. Does that mean that concepts that go on the shelf don't happen?
Jula: The important thing when working on video games - you have to love your work, your children, but sometimes you have to give it away. The project changes, evolves. There are new technological aspects, for example, a new way of playability, which can influence you to change the whole location. For me, it's important that the objects I influence will reach a wider range of people than the hundred objects I once designed, working for an architectural firm. And I can see what effect it has, what emotions it evokes, whether it is interesting or not. Watching the struggles through of a person from the other side of the world walking through "your" streets and talking about it is something phenomenal.
Blazej: You've talked about the influence of studies on work, the relationship of optimizing the design process and game development. How do you think contemporary architecture can draw from video games? The first thing that comes to my mind is precisely the focus on effects, that element of "coolness" in architecture, where something happens, surprises the user. Is there a feedback effect and is the younger generation of designers, raised on video games, even subconsciously taking advantage of these experiences?
Jula: I wish this was the case for myself and for all of us. Gaming provides powerful experiences like art - sometimes even catharsis. I hope that the backward effect, when games draw on life and then life draws on games, will become stronger in the future.
The same is true of fantasy literature from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s describing some utterly uncanny phenomena, which we then, more or less consciously, began to create in games. Games are less limited, they can create different emotions, and they are also naturally testing spaces for human perception. It seems to me that if we study certain things from the perspective of player perception, and then use this knowledge when creating architecture, it can be very beneficial. I didn't end my adventure with architecture ten years ago at all. I use it on an ongoing basis - new studies on space design, perception, sociology, psychology of space. I look at how real space affects people, and try to translate this into the tools I use in games. I don't see why, once we have a fair amount of data collected from game exploration, we won't translate it and test it in the real world.
Blazej: This is reminiscent of the multidisciplinary approach to design present in architecture in the 1970s, where designers were eager to collaborate with sociologists or psychologists.
Jula: Let's remember that many things in games are still done intuitively. But if you analyze five successful games, you start to see a pattern at a given point. If you take that pattern out and analyze it in terms of the psychology of the space, the sociological aspects, or how the human eye catches specific patterns, you find that it works because it's based on specific knowledge.
Blazej: So we have a full continuation of the interrupted work of modernism: research from perception, prefabrication, which was rejected as an unwanted legacy of a bygone era.
Jula: I am very disappointed by this. The idea of prefabrication is so good! We just need good materials! That was the only problem.
Blazej: This has all been taken over by the video game world.
Jula: Because it's good! Reception, impressions, emotions. Creating something that is easy to modify and upgrade in space - these are good tools, optimal.
Blazej: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed: Błażej Ciarkowski
Illustrations provided courtesy of Juli Arendt.
