World and levels › The idea
World scale: meters, minutes and density
Know first: How a world is built: from large to small
The first thing you decide about a world is its size, and the usual way to state it is in square kilometers. The result is usually a big, empty world. Measure size the way the player feels it instead: in body heights, steps and minutes of travel. The lesson explains what “1” means in an engine’s numbers (a centimeter in Unreal, a meter in Unity) and why a game character outruns a recreational runner. It also covers how far you can see from a hill, why game worlds are compressed and how often something new should turn up along the way, on foot and by car.
Why this matters
“How big will the world be?” “Four by four kilometers.” That answer says almost nothing. At an ordinary walking pace you cross such a world in 48 minutes. A game character runs across it in 13 minutes, and a car at 90 km/h drives across in under 3. The same square is three different worlds.
The typical first world is huge and empty. The player runs across grass toward a distant forest for five minutes, and nothing happens. Or the opposite: they get into a car, and two minutes later the world is over. Both worlds were designed in kilometers instead of around what the player experiences.
In the Swiss mountains, the yellow signposts on trails read “to the lake, 40 minutes,” not kilometers. Three kilometers uphill and three on the flat are different walks, and the minutes tell you accurately how long it takes. Measure the scale of a game world the same way: in minutes of travel and in what you meet on the way. In the lesson “How a world is built,” the work starts here: the idea and scale are settled on paper, before the first hill exists in the engine. Scale determines the size of the ground, the length of the roads, the number of places, and even how far to draw the forest.