The Art of Map Design

Dear Pathfinders,

The Stolen Lands cover a vast territory (35,000 square miles). On your journey, you will experience many fascinating tales and visit well over a hundred different locations.

We deliver our stories to you through these places, so we pay particular attention to our map design. Making each map is a unique task, which requires multiple team members to work together and use their specializations and skills. In today's update, we're going to show you how we create maps for Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

Note: For those of you not familiar with the Kingmaker Adventure Path, this update may contain minor spoilers.

Map Development

The process of map creation goes through several stages:

Preparation. Designers, writers, and artists decide what kind of location we need, and outline initial information about it.

For example, let's take the entrance to a hidden dwarven outpost, the location from the second part of the Adventure Path. From the adventure, we know that this place is not easy to find and occupied by trolls.

General plot and blockout of the gameplay area. Usually, when the work on a map begins, the story is already written, so our map designers have a general idea of what's going on with that map. First, they create the rough geometry of the location, and then they add approximate gameplay elements: we're placing enemies, adding blanks for dialogues, attaching scripted events, and placing traps and hidden items. This way, we can playtest the map at as early as possible and fix mistakes and problems, which would require more effort to change in the final version of the map. We use prototypes for almost everything in the development – for example, when we first started working on our game, all creatures shared the same model. So players could meet dogs, kobolds, ponies, and trolls, all of which looked like bandits.

The artists intended to make the outpost entrance scenic, which caused a few problems: scenic or not, the entrance had to be well-hidden. The blockout area had to be changed more than five times to fit the criteria.

The first topology. The scenic view was not spectacular enough.

In this version, the player starts near the outpost. There was not enough space for enemies.

The final blockout version of the well-hidden and scenic dwarven outpost.

Adding the content. After our designers' playtests the rest of the crew gets to work: the artists create concepts and make models of map elements, the writers finalize the dialogue texts, the programmers add in the mechanics. This time is the most difficult in the process of map-creating. In this stage, it's especially important for the designer to make sure the design stays intact during these alterations.

We want to give you the full Golarion experience, and for that locations must express game atmosphere in every detail, so map design takes a lot of time and effort. In Owlcat Games map-decoration is a task for artists, not for designers, like in many other companies. This way the designers get more time to plot out the flow of the map and add gameplay content to the location.

After the blockout of the area is accepted, the artists make an overpaint of the area and start to create content.

According to the initial plan, a troll was supposed to stand on the wall and hurl rocks at the players. But in the final version of the map, the wall was moved a few meters, so the troll could no longer hit the party. To solve this, we adjusted the initial placement of the enemies.

Finalization. When the map content is ready, the designer syncs gameplay with the final artistic version of the location and passes it to the testing department. In this stage, we finalize navigation, settings for the fog of war and the rewards. The only thing remaining is to add the location to the global map.

As a result, we've got a nice map with the entrance to the dwarven outpost - scenic, but well-hidden, populated with trolls and ready to be present to you with all its challenges and plot twists.

Tools

It would be impossible to create hundreds of maps in acceptable time without proper tools. The game is built using the Unity engine, and one of the Unity's strengths is its ability to expand tools. For the needs of our designers the programmers have created convenient editing programs to quickly let them fill the game with content and gameplay options:

DialogueEditor - the Editor for dialogue and special events. It helps us compose branched dialogues and fill them with events.

CutsceneEditor - the Editor for scripted scenes for various important in-game events and for making the maps more lively. This tool allows us to describe scripted scenes in short commands (e.g.: Go there -> Turn to the enemy -> Say the phrase)

We made this picture as a demonstration of the editor; we are aware that casting arcane spells in heavy armor leads to occasional failures.

NodeEditor - Game Scripts Editor. It helps to describe interactive events, which happen on the map, in easily understandable visual schemes.

NIKOLAY - It's a joke name for a specially programmed tool which creates new objects in the game (locations, quests, dialogues, cutscenes... ). Some our designers think of Nikolay as an actual colleague. Nikolay can create new objects faster than any designer, set their initial settings, and put them in the right folders.

Workspace - while working with the maps, our designers work with just a subset of the all game resources. To avoid constant searching for those resources over the entire project, they are making shortcuts to them and place them on the workspace. Each map has its own workspace or even several of them. Workspaces make editing the map much faster and more efficient.

Our maps tell stories. Through them, we strive to make your game experience fascinating and emotional.

What did you think of today's update? Got any feedback or questions for us? Let us know in the comments section, and we'll get back to you in no time!