World and levels › Space and combat
Interior and exterior
Know first: Direct and indirect light, Fog and post-processing
A room in a game is not a small street, and the entrance to a house is one of the hardest places in a game world. Indoors the sizes are different, the light is different and the camera is cramped, and at the doorway all of this changes within a second. This lesson covers scale indoors, the move from light into shadow and auto exposure. After that come windows and fixtures, doors, the story a room tells, and four ways to keep interiors in a big world.
Why this matters
The player runs along a sunlit street and walks into a house. The screen goes black for a few seconds: the camera is still set for the sun. Inside, the camera behind the player runs into the walls, and the doorway feels narrow. Going back out, the opposite happens: the street flashes white.
Real life does the same. You step from bright sun into a stairwell and for a couple of seconds you can’t see anything, until the eye adapts. In a game the designer decides how long that takes, so the threshold between street and room is a design problem of its own.