[Skarn]

Hello, Model-Changing Network. In this article I am going to speak about my thoughts on the way level design should work in World of Warcraft, so it may come handy for those who want to create custom zones.

This is not going to be a how-to or step by step tutorial. That's more like an overview of basic steps, principles, tricks and many other things that I suspect Blizzard using in creation of their content. Opinions expressed here are entirely my own and may come not quite correct in reality, as I am not a professional level designer. Though, anyway that's what I think to be correct and from my own experience it works out pretty well.

Zone concept

The first thing that any zone requires for sure is the concept. You can't just create a random zone that has no purpose and idea behind it and expect it to look great. I am more than sure that random creations should not serve any purposes other than tests. And even tests actually have a little idea behind such as testing a new terrain style, testing tools or testing your own capabilities. 

Atmosphere and general story

I think that atmosphere and basic storyline are those two parts you should start designing your zone with. They should actually be developed simultaneously while you are thinking your concept over. The first thing you need to decide is what for you are creating a zone. Think a little of the events that you are going to add there. Don't try to come up with a detailed storyline and try to avoid making up characters that are going to participate in the questline of the zone. That's always too much for the first step. Just decide what race this zone will be dedicated to, what kind of major event is going to take place there (to say, is it gonna be a battlefield, a peaceful forest or a creepy dark canyon full of spiders). 

After this part, comes the atmoshpere. Imagine the places you want to build there. Think of the overall atmosphere things like texture color scheme, possible doodads, lighting and so on. Just get an imaginary picture of how the entire thing should look like.

When you are done coming up with atmosphere ideas you can start thinking of somme particular places of interest, questing spots and other little things that you may want to havve in your zone. It is actually required for the next step of concept designing which is related to drawing a quick sketch of your zone. Anyway, if you have any particular atmosphere ideas about these places you can either think of them now or later during the actual zone development.

Map sketch

As I said previously, this step presupposes making of the map sketch. It is required for any zone if you want to make it look logical, natural and interesting to travel around when you are playing there. I have heard from a couple of guys that it is bad doing those "map plans" as in the end your zone simply turns out different from how you planned it to look like. Well, yes, they are kind of right as in the process of development you are trying to adjust your ideas and imaginary images from your mind to the capabilities of the game engine which is not always possible. That's quite normal and happens all the time, but you can change your plan any time, right? Most game developers do it, Blizzard devs do it and so we should.

Here is the image of that kind shown by Blizzard designers in the Arcraft series (I highly recommend you to read them as they contain quite a lot of design information and describe some parts of the zone creation process. Yet, they are far from being detailed enough to teach you doing something from scratch.)

As you can see on the picture, the map contains all the significant places such as towns, camps, dungeons, questing spots and so on. Different colors indicate different terrain height (usual cartography rules for doing that are quite well known: ranges from dark green to dark brown). The problem here is that this map again contains half of the information that is required for designing the zone from scratch. Blizzard is a big company and the work in designing a zone is divided by many people. As we are modders and sadly do not usually own enough of the human resources to separate the work, we most often have to do everything or our own or sharing the work with only a couple of people. Thus, you also need to think about how the player interacts with the zone, the way he goes through the the questing chains. This is usually the infromation you base the road and places of interest (POI) location on. You can draw arrows to see how the player will follow the story to avoid concentrating all the action in one part of the zone or focring player to cross the entire zone all over and over again (a little problem of classic WoW quest design, I have to admit).