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All breakdowns
Every breakdown of a finished piece, by section.
World and levels
Zelda: Breath of the Wild — triangles and gravityBreakdownHow Nintendo leads players across a huge field without markers: places that pull each player by what they want, land shaped as triangles that hide and reveal, the road to a tower in five steps, checking on foot, and three rulers for sizing the world.Firewatch: a forest built by a small teamBreakdownHow a team of about a dozen people built a stylized forest that leads the player without a map on the screen: a poster turned into 3D with fog from a ramp of colors, color from light rather than textures, a few trees placed thousands of times, space carved from the land, a paper map in the hero’s hands.Horizon Zero Dawn: placing a world by rulesBreakdownHow Guerrilla placed all the nature of Horizon Zero Dawn by rules, on the graphics card, around the player: the land as a stack of maps, graphs of rules that give each plant a density, a dither pattern that turns density into exact spots, and kinds of trees that share one pattern so they never collide.Far Cry 5: a world built by rules in HoudiniBreakdownHow Ubisoft rebuilt the cliffs, rivers, fences, power lines and forests of Far Cry 5 from the terrain every night with tools made in Houdini: the goals, the pipeline inside the editor, cliffs from the slope, and species that compete for the ground, while artists kept reshaping the land.Ghost of Tsushima: the island, the grass and the windBreakdownHow Sucker Punch fit the island of Tsushima onto a PS4 with napkin math and maps instead of objects, built the land in the engine, grew fields of grass on the GPU, drove everything from one wind, and turned that wind into the way the game leads the player.Epic’s PCG samples: assemblies, flat ground and biomesBreakdownWhat to learn from Epic’s free PCG examples that open in Unreal Engine: hand-built assemblies turned into points and varied by rules, point hierarchies, the Flat Area Detector that keeps flat assets off bumps, and the Biome Core plugin, a biome tool made of graphs.de_dust2: why the map has lasted for decadesBreakdownHow the most-played map of Counter-Strike is built: a simple figure eight, arches that split the map into places and cut sightlines, roads, trim and one sun for readability, a place for close fights and long ones, cover that favors one team in each phase of a round, and a bomb site rebuilt during testing.Dark Souls: a world that folds back on itselfBreakdownHow the first Dark Souls joins its world into one piece without loading breaks: a rough map before any art, a small shrine with ways out in every direction, shortcuts that bring the player back to it, a way down where home shrinks out of view, Anor Londo as a reward with no clear road, and what critics found missing.Hitman: Sapienza, a town built as a sandboxBreakdownHow IO Interactive built Sapienza: a coastal town that wraps around itself with no dead ends, six kinds of public and private space, disguises that give the player a role, targets kept on short routes after playtests, story threads that open a way in, and what the team itself thinks went wrong.