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Skyrim - Modularity Article Takeaways (You can also fight art fatigue at a…

- - - - Looking again towards the benefits of working modular, one of the big bonuses (especially from a production viewpoint) is that a modular approach helps if your team has a low ratio of artists to designers. (OR you are the only one)
        
        To put this into proportion, the infographic shown here represents the kit art team as yellow, level design as orange, and the blue-gray area as a conservative estimate of the dungeon content created by that collective group.
        
        There are two points to make here. The first and most obvious: this approach allows a small number of artists to support a much larger team of designers, who can in turn generate a lot more content than those two artists otherwise could.
        
        The second, less-obvious point is the more important one, however. Think of the other 80 people in that team photograph. Because such a relatively small group was able to handle the dungeon component of the game, it allowed the rest to focus on the myriad other needs of the game, whether it was landscaping the massive world, writing and scripting the many quests, contributing to character art and animation, working in the guts of our game code.
        
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- - - - Finally, if you’re making a game with environmentally contextual gameplay, like a cover shooter or platformer, figure out some important gameplay measurements early on. If you’re making a platformer, figure out how far the player can jump. How far can the player fall before dying or taking damage? If a cover shooter, know what height of cover I can shoot out from.
- - - - This also influences the number of "Sub-Kits" that each kit has. A sub-kit is what we call each part of the kit that works with the rest of it. Common examples include a "small room" sub-kit, or a "large hallway" sub-kit. The cave kit has seven sub-kits, while the Ratway has only three. The number of pieces in each of these sub-kits also varies between kits. The "small hallway" cave sub-kit has around 50 pieces. The Ratway hall sub-kit has only seven pieces. Knowing the scope of a kit will help you make good decisions about how robust the kit will need to be, and how much time should be spent building it.
        
        THE PROOF PHASE
        
        The point of this phase is to start to test out the major concepts of the kit, and it's the first point at which we'll begin building actual assets to bring into the editor.
        
        We're still keeping everything fairly high-level and not getting too deeply involved with building the art, however. Proof pieces have almost no mesh detail and usually no textures at all. Instead, we'll be playing with proportions, kit logic, naming conventions, and other basic needs. Because of that, this stage of the process is also relatively quick, often only 1-3 weeks, depending on the scope of the kit, and how many failed iterations of the proof pieces end up being created and disposed of.
        Before we can create the first mesh, however, there are several important details you have to know about kit-building.
        
        First, we have to agree upon one of the most important details for any kit - its footprint. The footprint is the foundation of the entire kit. The most common footprints for kits are equilateral, but other proportions can lead to kits with their own distinct feel. These fundamental decisions are very important, as it will influence the visual identity of the final kit. In this image, the green grid represents the footprint of several pieces used to build a simple room from Skyrim's completed cave kit.
        
        It's important to note that although the various sub-kits of one kit do not have to share the same footprint, those footprints should be multiples of each other. Otherwise, even if the kit pieces initially snap together, as a kit loops back around on itself, it will no longer line up. For example, a 512x512x512 room will always tile nicely with a 256x256x256 hallway, but a 384x384x384 room will eventually create gaps and/or overlaps.
        
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