Designing Versatile Spaces

Tile Design Philosophy

The basic building block of TWD:E's world is a "tile", a 64mx64m Unity prefab containing all the necessary art assets, gameplay objects, navigation collision, and connectors (roads, streams, etc.). These tiles are organized based on their environment type and connectors. For each of TWD:E's 81 zones, 16 of our 150+ tiles are arranged to connect with each other and the neighboring zones. 

This approach was vital to the development of TWD:E, as our small team did not have the resources to build such a large world out of entirely bespoke environments. The tiles allowed me and the environment artists to deliver a polished world while leveraging the same tile in multiple spots across the map.

Tiles were assembled with the following parameters in mind:

1. Tiles are always 64mx64m, and arranged in a 4x4 grid to create a playable zone

2. Tiles are built to fit a certain environment type, namely wilderness, rural, suburban, or urban

3. Tiles with connectors are tracked accordingly. Each environment type needs tiles that cover all the different connector configurations (turns, intersections, dead-ends, etc.)

4. Tiles are built to be rotatable and still look good, increasing their re-usability

5. Tiles contain gameplay functionality, including resource spawners, enemy spawners, lootable containers, player respawn points, navigation collision, etc.

Tile Design Process

1. Environment Artists originate a tile by building a rough draft and saving it as a Unity prefab. Focus on broad strokes (buildings, roads, etc.)

2. I do a design pass on rough draft tiles, adjusting the layout to facilitate gameplay, adding in resource, loot, and enemy spawners, and setting up navigation collision

3. Playtest tiles and iterate on any visual or gameplay issues discovered (repeat this step as many times as needed)

4. Environment Artists do a polish pass, adding in smaller props, foliage, ground details, etc.

5. I implement the tile into the world assembly toolkit, allowing it to be used in the zones that make up the game world.

Wilderness Tiles

Rural Tiles

Suburban Tiles

Urban Tiles