Scaling Woes

One issue that we’ve been wrestling with a lot this week is scaling our world. Because we now have a fairly accurate geographical representation of the land around Hiroshima, there’s a certain expectation that the rest of the world (buildings, trees, people, other props) will be more or less true to life as well. A (close to) 1:1 scale isn’t necessarily difficult to achieve just by eyeballing it with Google Earth, and a 1:1 scale “feels” really “right,” whatever that means. However, there are some challenges associated with such a literal recreation:

  1. Asset creation. There is a ton of land to be filled with various assets. Rubble, dead trees, bodies, destroyed houses, moderately destroyed houses, lightly damaged houses, undamaged houses — in short, lots and lots of buildings, even for the thin pie slice we’ve chosen.
  2. Walking speed. One of our goals is to show the varying levels of destruction at different distances from the blast epicenter by having the player walk from the outside of the blast, where damage is minimal to non-existent, to the center, where the damage is catastrophic. In reality, this would require a trek of approximately 1.5 miles. Assuming a normal human walking speed, this would probably take about 20-30 minutes. Not only would this make our experience really long, but the reality is that the majority of it would just be, well, walking.

We also tried scaling everything up a bit, but this created a new set of problems.

  1. Obvious size inaccuracies. Maybe they’re only obvious to us because we’ve been staring at maps of Hiroshima for so long, but when the buildings that we do currently have in place are scaled up beyond a certain point, they are just so enormous that it looks sort of silly, especially when you look at them from the top of the starting hill. It looks like you could get from one river to the next (a distance of about 0.85 miles) in about fifty steps. Then again, as I said, someone who isn’t as familiar with the geography of Hiroshima may not really realize it.
  2. Incorrect perspectives. Scaling the buildings up means that we also have to scale up the size of our first person controller. When we scale the first person controller up by about 3 times, the hill that we start on, which is supposed to be about a hundred feet high, looks like it’s about 10 feet tall. Again, maybe someone who hasn’t been staring at maps of Hiroshima every day for the past months won’t really notice…but I can’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t.

In the end, I think the real limiting factor here is going to be how many assets Noreen and Anabelle can create to fill the space. With enough assets, I’m sure we can figure out some compromise between scaling and gameplay. It’s just difficult to envision and design the experience when we’re working with such a blank slate.

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