The best type of door in a video game is one that no one remembers. Of course, everyone can appreciate a big, beautiful door with great animations, says Owlchemy Labs developer Pete Galbraith. But in a video game, doors are often synonymous with a huge design headache. Forgettable means that a developer has done his job well. “If it fits into the environment, it makes sense for its context and works exactly as the player expects, at that moment it was simply a door as real as any other in the player’s real life,” says Galbraith. “I can’t imagine higher praise for a door in a game.”
Last week, dozens of developers from various disciplines and teams shared their frustrations on Twitter. Trash of Death The creator Stephan Hövelbrinks explained that the ports “have all kinds of possible bugs”. The Last of Us Part II game co-director Kurt Margenau called “the thing that took the longest to get right”. How the doors work is different during “combat tension”, when players are in the middle of the match, vs. no, for example: the doors close slowly during combat, but remain open during exploration. “If a player is going to open a door, it cannot just fly, the character has to reach for the handle and push it,” explained Margenau in a tweet. “But how about closing behind you? How do you do this while running? “
Doors are not the only common objects that developers struggle with. Developers The Verge spoke to point to objects like strings or mirror. After Half-life: AlyxAt launch, a project developer spoke at length about how they managed to make the drink bottles look so realistic. Designer Liz England points out stairs, elevators and mobile platforms as well. “I think the doors themselves tend to have a much higher reputation for being terrible because they are (1) much more common in the real world (I use doors every day!) And (2) they are much more common, so in games, so more people can use it as a touchstone for ‘unexpectedly difficult interactivity’ ”, says England The Verge. “I never had to implement a mirror or a rope, but I already had my fair share of doors.”
A door is not exactly the best or most intelligent invention of humanity in the real world. It is a comically simple concept – a large open rectangle for entry or exit – which in development becomes a problem for the entire team. As Crystal Dynamics game director Will Kerslake said in a message to The Verge, there are “so many problems with doors”. In one example, touching specifically on animation, Kerslake explained that doors can open towards you or towards you; the handles can be on either side. “If you can get involved with that door in different states, like crouching or running, then this is an additional set of animations,” he says. “A door you open requires you to step back in the real world to get out of the way, that’s another set of questions. In a first-person game, you can animate the door and not the player, and this is easier. In a high-fidelity third-person game, there is an expectation that the player’s hand will move to the handle. ”And the location and angle of the players when they engage with any door can and will vary.
Other problems can involve multiple players fighting for a door at the same time, or even non-player characters. If a port hits an NPC, does the port stop or does the NPC move? “The choices here can cause all kinds of bugs, depending on your game,” says Kerslake.
It is not that making doors in a video game is an impossible task. For some developers, it just isn’t worth it. “As a result, many games avoid doors in gameplay, you would be surprised at the number of games that do not have interactive doors,” says Keslake. “Many doors, but the important doors are missing or are already open. The next step in complexity is the doors used only as gates of progress, they open only and cannot be closed again. ”
The technical points, of which there are many, overlook the way in which players process the digital representation of a door. Everyone knows how a door works and therefore has a subconscious understanding and expectation of how it moves, sounds, looks. The level of precision required for a player to believe that the door is a door is higher for a common object than for a fantasy object, says Galbraith.
“Our ideas of how we interact with them are incredibly clear due to the cognitive reinforcement we get from interacting with them so often in many different ways. For doors like those in our homes, we subconsciously learn the smallest details of how they work, such as the rate at which they close or how much we can move them while they are locked. So, when we see a door in a game that closes very fast or without friction or when there is a locked door where the handle does not swing and makes a noise, we notice that something is not right about that. “
You can still lie a little bit. Although most doors only go in one direction, for example, game doors tend to open on both sides. “When these types of virtual doors look, sound and behave like normal doors, they reach a level of mental acceptance with the player that allows the player to continue without questioning why all of the game’s doors simply open away from them,” Galbraith says. “For them, it’s just a strange coincidence that the brain unconsciously chooses to ignore.”
Doors are not just an aesthetic or immersion technique in video games; they often serve as part of the level design. These are gates that prevent players from moving forward until they complete a puzzle or defeat a boss; they can act as markers of the player’s progress, create tension or act as cover. “Doors are just one of several tools that a developer can use when designing levels,” says Galbraith. “Many games employ other methods by the doors to avoid potential problems and even just to help vary the content.”
With one exception: “Unless the door is really small and cute, in this case, it’s just a capable door!”