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Ghost of Tsushima: the island, the grass and the wind
Know first: Biomes: how a forest is built
This breakdown takes apart how Sucker Punch Productions built the island of Ghost of Tsushima (2020) for the PlayStation 4: its land, its fields of grass and its wind. The wind became both the look of the game and the way it leads the player. The sources are the slides of two talks at GDC 2021, the Game Developers Conference. Adrian Bentley, the coding team lead, spoke on building and loading the island, and Bill Rockenbeck on simulating the wind. An interview with the creative and art director Jason Connell tells how the wind came about. What makes it a good example: one idea, wind, runs through art, technology and design at once.
The whole picture
| Part | The problem | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| The island on a napkin | The studio’s old way of building would need hundreds of gigabytes | Estimate first, then build for a budget of a few megabytes per tile |
| Building the land | Building it in a 3D program was slow and fragile | Painting and procedural growth inside the engine, on the GPU |
| Grass | Fields of grass for miles, on a PS4 | Maps of grass type and height, and blades made on the GPU near the player |
| One wind | Everything must move with the same wind | One wind model for particles, plants, grass and cloth |
| The Guiding Wind | Lead the player without arrows on the screen | Make the wind blow toward the goal |