The interview with Julia Arendt appeared in A&B 5'2021
Night City is a dystopian, multicultural metropolis of the near future, dangerous and appealing at the same time. Designed in the 1990s by urban planner Richard Night, it has become "the worst place to live in America." It is there that the action of the game Cyberpunk 2077 is set. However, it is impossible to reduce Night City only to the role of scenography and, background - it is one of the characters of the presented world, almost equal to the character the player plays.
Who stepped into Night's role and designed the Cyberpunk world? What do prefabrication and video games have in common? What are the tasks of an urban planner in a world of virtual exploration, chases and shootouts? Jula Arendt, architect, artist and game designer of video game environments for AAA projects (Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Dying Light, Cyberpunk 2077, among others), talks about architecture in games.
Jula ARENDT - specialist in environment/urban planning for projects such as "Dying Light" by Wrocław-based studio Techland, and "Cyberpunk 2077" by Kraków-based studio CD Projekt Red. She translates her architectural knowledge into solutions for smoothly navigating the game environment. He uses his experience as a lead concept artist to make the character's steering mechanisms readable on a subconscious level and not disrupt either the game's aesthetics or the key gameplay element of immersion. Understanding the basics of human perception and how to manipulate images is now a must-have tool in game design.
Blazej Ciarkowski: Let's start with a trivial question: how did an architect end up in the world of video games? You yourself admit that this is not the most obvious career path for representatives of our profession.
Jula Arendt: The answer to this question becomes more and more unattainable in retrospect [laughs]. My history with the industry began without me, so to speak. I completed five years of studies at the Faculty of Architecture at the Szczecin University of Technology, after which I was busy gaining experience in the profession. When I was preparing for the licensing exams, the volume of material made me frankly fed up with buildings and their cross-sections. At that time, friends sent my drawings to Techland. They only told me about it later, when it turned out that I was to have an interview!
It was a dramatic experience for me, because I didn't have much experience as a gamer. Instead, I had to deal with video games as an observer. It gave me pleasure to see games as a certain closed form, a certain project. However, if someone had asked me how long I had been playing video games - here it would have been worse. The very fact that I was invited to further interviews was a pleasant surprise. The interview took place in Wroclaw. The art director asked if I play video games. Well, okay," I thought, "so this is where our conversation will end. I said no, but I watch video games. He looked at me: "What do you mean you watch it?" I said that I saw such and such games. In these games I noticed such and such a pattern, color codes that guide the player. I saw how the geometry of the paths is built....
After this conversation, my portfolio was opened. It consisted of a mass of different strange drawings, because I must point out that I do not have one defined style of drawing, I like to challenge myself and change the line, depending on the mood and what I happen to be interested in. The art director, who hired me and later was my mentor, admitted that he was not sure if the author of the drawings presented was one person.
I was given an assignment. This was the first of the drawings I did for the game Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. It said: "Draw a dilapidated wooden hut that stands in the woods."
Concept sketch for the game Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
pic: © Jula Arendt
Blazej: So you didn't get away from the architecture?
Jula: I thought I would take a break from buildings, and here it turned out that I was told to do a building! The problem was that I didn't yet have experience as a concept artist (I was an architect), so I asked if I could do the drawings by hand. The only thing I had on hand was a pen. I was given a white sheet of paper. I ask, "A wooden cottage, but from which period, more or less?". They look at me. "Well, you have to specify it. One thousand-eight hundred-which one? How long was this cottage unused? How long was it ruined?" They look at me again. "I need to know how dilapidated it is. Was this cottage destroyed naturally or did someone deliberately destroy it?" I thought, this is a new job for an architect - this is the first time I'm consciously knocking something down, not building it! In four hours I created more than a dozen drawings - plan, cross-section, perspective views, details... All in pen.
I was accepted because a person with architectural knowledge was needed. This was something new. Up until then, the positions of concept artist were mostly taken on by people with art education. But at some point, around the time my adventure with the industry began, people began to realize that in addition to certain aesthetic qualities, there must also be some truth in the designs. That they had to look like something real, something the player could believe existed.
Concept sketch for the game Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
pic: © Jula Arendt
Blazej: What were the beginnings of working in an environment with completely new characteristics like?
Jula: I started working on Gunslinger (Call of Juarez: Gunslinger), that is, I was doing a lot of design of wooden objects, which were to be destroyed in imaginative ways. Of course, for the first three months of my work, I was convinced that it would be a fascinating but short adventure in the video game industry, which I would remember fondly years later. Such a breather before approaching the exams.
It was a shock. The transition from a design studio that was very rigorous, where there was maybe ten percent creativity in architectural or urban design, and the rest was a rather fluid interpretation of regulations.
Blazej: Very fluid at times.
Jula: Oh yes! It turns out that "and" or a comma can be interpreted very differently depending on your needs [laughs]. And from that reality I entered a world where I could build things that were partially destroyed, think about the forms of their destruction. It was fun - the first time to ultimately depict buildings in disrepair, rather than perfect in their completeness. Another plus was that I could see the results of my work very quickly. This stimulated further creativity. However, I still treated it as an adventure. As something fascinating, but probably not for me, because I'm not that type of person.
Blazej: That type of person, that is, who actually?
Jula: It seemed to me that in order to work on video games you have to be an avid gamer who goes home and sits for five hours at a time playing games. And if it's the weekend - thirteen hours at a time. That's more or less how I imagined it [laughs].
Concept sketch for the game Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
pic: © Jula Arendt
Blazej: We already know that your knowledge of architecture has proven useful in the video game development process.
Jula: I must add that not only in terms of the styles themselves.
Blazej: The logic of construction?
Jula: The logic of construction. It's how things corrode, how they deteriorate. But there is also architectural knowledge and urban planning knowledge that can be used in video games. It's knowledge that is injected into us in architectural history classes, and it's about, for example, how temples were built, how city squares were planned. That Egyptian temples, in order to have a certain effect on the faithful, had a series of shrinking rooms at the beginning, only to have something impressive at the end. For us architects, this is something obvious - a good old trick to achieve a "wow" effect!
Blazej: It's interesting, because one gets the impression that there is less and less of the "wow!" effect understood in this way in architecture. Has it moved to the virtual world?
Jula: The virtual world has no technological limitations. There are no legal restrictions. We can demolish everything and start from scratch. Those things that we, as architects, are not allowed to do, so that the user of the space doesn't feel stunned or stressed, so that there are no dark gates, rooms that are too low - as a game designer you can do deliberately to get the right effect in the story line presented.
Modular design of a game environment with an urban structure (Dying Light I)
pic: © Jula Arendt
Blazej: In preparation for our conversation, I took a short walk through Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. You said that there are no legal restrictions in the design of a video game world, but everything I saw looked very logical. The layout of the streets, the infrastructure...
Jula: That's the credibility. What we know from the real world has to be translated into geometry in the game, so that we can believe that the space is real. No one will forbid us from putting up a taller building, but someone might say, "I'm walking through this space and I don't feel this thing. I don't feel it's real."
Night City seems plausible because it is built according to rules. It has a center, districts assigned to specific communities. Streets, depending on their category, adhere to traffic rules in such a way as to create an interesting visual effect, and at the same time so that the player-hero can easily get from one point to another. The designed objects must have their functions and meaning.
We have reached a certain stage in game environment design. Rarely do we have to deal with scenery that merely fills in the background. Very often it plays an additional role: it introduces mood, atmosphere, directs the player to certain things, sometimes tells a story. It is part of the emerging philosophy and creation of environments in video games before our eyes.
