Mos Eisley
Rebuilding an iconic city
Before Outlaws, I'd had experience working in urban environments and architectural layouts. However this time I was in charge of a whole city, and a legendary one at that. Needless to say I was excited for the challenge and dove right into it.
The first order of business was to acquaint myself with the team, direction and immediate needs as I'd joined a moving train. Thankfully at that point the production on Tatooine was still in early stages and there was still significant ownership to be claimed.
Urban Redesign
Alongside my level artist, Livio Ambrosini, who was instrumental in accomplishing that whole mandate, the rebuilding of the city began.
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Rebuilding was necessary for a variety of reasons, the main one being the speeder bike no longer being accessible within.
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This meant refactoring the whole layout since it needed to fit largely different metrics. Me and Livio did our best to keep a few of the most interesting parts of the old layout and went about making the rest from the ground up.
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The city articulated around two of its landmarks: the massive, brutalist Ubrikkian Trade Tower and the wreckage of the ship the Dowager Queen.
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Using those as the main points of reference was important as the city itself is very flat. From them we drew new limits, both for the entrances to the city and for the map limit, as the city as nested at a map edge.
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The next important part was to determine how many streets we would have and where to use them. Streets were our bread and butter for player navigation and as such needed to mainly connect the center to the edges.
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Around the streets we adjusted the main gameplay landmarks of the city, such as the player landing pad, Jabba's Townhouse and another, quest-used landing pad.
Once that was done and iterated enough we had our first draft.
Organizing and Laying the Groundwork
With a strong overall layout in our hands, Livio and I bounced ideas and focused down on references we believed to be the most usable with our asset pool and time in order to elevate each area of the city to its best.
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I separated the city in those areas early on so as to work in a structured way with our tools and to make sure content would be spread around properly.
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I made documentation showcasing them on a map, then additional documentation showing goals for activities spread, crowd life density, navigation opportunities, landmarks and scripted events and encounters.
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That documentation evolved as I went into the blockout for each street, each plaza and eventually each nook and cranny. I iterated both on the map and on the layout with many tests to make sure sightlines were good and the guidance felt natural.
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It became quickly clear that creating the feeling of a busy town, with crowded markets and unsafe back alleys, would be essential to the experience so I went into iterations on spawning many NPCs into different zones to test what felt comfortable and how they could contribute to the layout.
The Design of the Outskirts
One of the biggest challenges was actually not in the city: it was its Outskirts.
I had seen that coming early on with the new boundaries and the new limit to the speeder enabled area, and as I worked on the interior of the city I kept thinking about it and drawing sketches for it but the time came to solve the issue once and for all.
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I observed what other cities in the game did, however their layouts were largely more funneled around their entrances, where Mos Eisley's outskirts covered a bigger area than the city itself due to the plain.
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I then went back to the roots and pored over google maps of North African towns and cities.
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Specifically I looked at their outskirts and approaches into the town. I established a few guiding principles from that, like having pockets of houses standing near a main road but well out on their own.
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The main access roads were the key to that layout, separating it already between the two main entrances.
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I used that separation to try and give each quadrant thus created its own identity so players wouldn't feel lost.
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One area I replaced most buildings with moisture farms with their distinctive and low height structures.
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Another I pushed to have as a sort of industrial zone, with a bantha farm, larger compounds coming with their own shipping and generally bigger buildings.
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For the central part I kept it with small outcroppings of buildings that either clearly indicated they weren't explorable or added small content there.
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Finally, I pushed to create a hamlet with the same rules as the city and a denser population, which added a little nugget of urban exploration in the middle of the outskirts, and could be used as a stopping spot for the Jawas' Sandcrawler encounter.
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With all of that and discussions back and forth with art and world direction, as well as with my artist of course, I got to a result I was happy with: I could drive through the outskirts and find things to do, as well as easily find my way to the nearest city entrance.
The Gameplay Inside
For the rest of the time I balanced quest needs, city-exclusive rewards and exploration. That last point was where another one of the challenges of this layout came into play: cities were designed to be non-combat for the most part, for various design and technical reasons.
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This meant working with a significant amount of mechanics and the corresponding level design ingredients unavailable.
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Thankfully Nix, our companion, was still there, and I was determined to use him.
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Livio and I thus looked into opening up several interiors in order to create porosity and a more intricate exploration.
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We eventually pitched our idea to direction and were given the greenlight with a solid plan to open a certain amount of interiors, with some rules (such as not waltzing into anyone's home to pilfer it, instead having a reasonable morale to your intrusion).
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​For each interior I designed a small puzzle using what mechanics I could still use.
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As much as possible I tried to keep a world-logic to each puzzle. For example, a fancier looking house would have a forcefield to disable but no other house would.
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Some puzzles were more intense, meant for players to earn them a bit more, such as the Imperial Spy house with the hidden room.
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Nix was instrumental in enabling puzzles with out of reach LDIs.
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I'm happy that I did not reuse a single puzzle for multiple interiors, only similar ingredients but used differently.
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Outside of that, I scoured the game for every type of content that could make the city worth revisiting over and over.
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The amazing narrative team integrated many small stories inside the city and in its outskirts.
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Some generic encounters could be adjusted for non-combat use.
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I added hidden loot throughout the city, meant for Nix to go and fetch once the player notices it.
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The outskirts got a few combat encounters, which I tried to tie to the world-logic of where they would spawn for the most part.
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Designing and Sharing systems
One last thing where Mos Eisley was a challenge was the need for systems to be built for the ambient life of the city. Those systems were collaboratively worked on with Technical Designers and then I shared the ones I had contributed to at large to put every city on the same standing.
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For Tatooine specifically, alongside Livio and other artists we pushed for and developed interior dressing templates to enable us to add more porosity and content on the planet without eating much of the level artists' time.
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With the support of Technical Designers and prop artists giving us cheaper spaceship models, I ended up building an Ambient Air Traffic system.
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The system used splines and a powerful compound node made by Martijn Dijksen to have those low-cost ships fly in random intervals above the city.
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Once the system was solid enough and got the blessings of direction, I made guidelines for it and shared it with the designers on other cities to add to the Star Wars vibes.
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There is even more to discuss but I felt like these were the main points I wanted to put up on here.
Mos Eisley was an amazing city to work on and the many challenges that arose from that mandate taught me much. I never resented working on it and it was always a pleasure to delve into its details and fix and adjust what I could find. I poured a lot of passion into it and I was very happy with the positive reception players had to it.
Mos Algo
Designing with loneliness
When I first got the mandate to build up the landmark of Mos Algo, there wasn't much outside of a ghost town and a tunnel in the cliffs, and of course the cliffs themselves, imposing with their scale in front of the Dune Sea.
I was in awe at the size of the location and its ambitions. As an exploration driven conglomeration of content, there was (literally) a lot of ground to cover. From the tunnels needing expansion to a whole canyon to be filled with a large navigation-based location, our work was cut out for me and my amazing artist, Jakub Wichnowski.
A Challenge to Adapt
I jumped into it eagerly because of the potential I could see, and in hindsight, I would have benefited from questioning some of the larger meta-design decision surrounding it a bit more.
I'm happy with the results, however I would have made some small changes and locked some things a bit more firmly early on that I waited on doing and ended up regretting it. Some of those things would have been:
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The scale of the location vs the size of the playable area.
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I had a sign off with other teams on what could be produced of course but in hindsight I should have pushed for a review and more assurance later on.
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The connectivity of the canyons with the content.
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Initially, more content was part of the central canyon, but that got scaled back late in the production to reach polish targets, I wish I could have done more to save the lost content.
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All in all I still believe the location works great as it is and I love the vibes it creates, I've just seen some cracks that I would've approached differently if I were to redo it.
Tunneling comes with strings attached
What I wanted to see as a central element initially were the mine tunnels. Mos Algo being an abandoned mining town, it made sense to me to explore the tunnels in search of abandoned riches. To an extent, this is the case with the final version, but early on I iterated on a tunnel system roughly twice the size of the current one, linking another end of the location to the main tunnel.
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Visual language was difficult to make for the tunnels.
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They needed to feel stuffy and dangerous but also give clear guidance. This was an issue for level art to prop efficiently at such a large scale.
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Lighting was also a challenge that we eventually solved after many iterations, between keeping things completely dark to have artificial lights all over. We went in between with a dynamic light system
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Designing a Navigation Layout
The big centerpiece of the place was always going to be the Lost Sandcrawler wreckage at its center. A large location surrounded by cliffs, an old mining shaft, it made for a very interesting navigation and climbing challenge for me to undertake.
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From my experience on Avatar, I'd worked with very vertical layouts, however this was still a fresh challenge due to the vastly different 3Cs.
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Kay's metrics were the first thing I tried to nail down, from her fatal fall distance to her running jump distance. I needed to make sure the layout wouldn't be skippable by falling from one floor to another and surviving.
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That meant overhangs and a path that went back under itself. With the evolving 3Cs, this was challenging to accomplish but me and my artist tried our best to foolproof the place against unwanted shortcuts.
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That being said, I kept my scripting parallel for the larger parts, meaning that if a player does skip a part of the content, nothing should stop them from completing the location normally.
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I put a lot of time into "scripting the vibe". From falling rocks scattered around, some triggering as Kay passes by, to lights flickering back to life under her actions, I wanted this place to feel eery, dusty and ancient.
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Thanks to Jakub and the amazing lighting team with Damien Tournaire amongst others, and Baptiste Pacaud-Erades on the VFX side, the whole place took an even better aspect than I could have wished for.
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The puzzle in the dark room took a few iteration and I scaled it back some, but it provides that feeling of restarting an ancient place of work.
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Nix was always going to be the star of it, so his gameplay changes impacted the layout and puzzle.
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The layout remains more or less what the final blockout was, and only the complexity was scaled back a bit. This was due to ongoing playtesting, and it brought its challenges as to readability in a dark environment and the overlapping stages of the puzzle.
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Sadly, despite my attempts to push for it, we couldn't produce an interior for the Sandcrawler as it would have taken significant production time to get it right, which was a very fair reason for a likely one-use location.
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I was still sad and even tried using the roof of the Sandcrawler as part of the navigation challenge but me, my lead and the Art team decided against it after some test iterations.
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Mos Algo and the Lost Sandcrawler were a pleasure to work on and despite some regrets on losing some of their ambitions, I'm proud of the results accomplished here thanks to the efforts of a great Art team.
