The Game Design Behind the Most Magical Place on Earth — Textures

Continuing the discussion of game design techniques visible in the theme park design of Disney World today I will discuss textures.

Textures

In the real world, everything is made out of something, we have intrinsic materiality and that gives everything that exists texture. In games, everything is made out of polygons (or sprites or voxels, but you know what I mean). Nothing has intrinsic texture and designers must choose how to create the materiality of their worlds by artificially applying images to those surfaces to create the illusion of texture. Themeparks, in this as in so many things, sit in the between space. Everything is created with a material, but many or even most things have their materials altered or textures painted on so that we perceive their materials to be different than they really are.

Creating and applying textures in games is one of the things that new game designers often have trouble with. It’s easy to grab and apply textures even if you are not an artist, but there are subtleties to applying textures realistically that are often missed, looking at theme park ‘texturing’ shows this clearly.

This image from the Magic Kingdom shows a number of different treatments of the edges and the intersection of different textures. Compare how the flagstones fade into the ground at the foot of the walls and how they artificially cut off in the other direction in the curved line. The area next to the walls feels much more natural as if the stones are old and have been buried or broken up into a more dirt-like texture. Use this kind of fade to create a more organic feeling. The curved line reads as artificial and intentional. In a game a curved line like this could read well and create the impression that the transition was diegetically artificial, that is to say, that it was made to look that way on purpose within the world. A straight line transition like this in a game would just look like textures smashed up against each other by a developer who couldn’t be bothered to make them look ‘realistic.’

The wall textures here are interesting as well. Note the capstones and baseboard stones that border the different rough wall stone textures. Rarely is there just a single wall or floor texture in the real world, there are almost always border textures of some kind, more on that later.

The hidden transition between the dark grey and tan stone wall textures is also interesting. By staggering the intersection rather than having the two walls meet at a corner the impression of two different pieces of architecture is created, even though the two walls were almost certainly created at the same time. Additionally, the inclusion of arrow slits at the top of the wall creates a false impression of size in the wall, I will talk more about decoration in the next article.

In non-theme-park architecture the technique of a false front or facade is common, in theme parks it is omnipresent, and in games it is intrinsic. The walls in Galaxy's edge are designed to look as if they are made of various kinds of stone when of course they are all (or mostly) created from concrete. In many, many locations in the parks, physical texture is applied to concrete to make it look like other materials or to create the impression of age. As a game designer consider the age of the object you are texturing not just the material it is made of.

In the corner you can also see that the wall is stained from age, of course, it is not old and the artificial color has been applied along with the texture to sell that illusion. The discoloration at the edges of textures is also a way to create the believable transition between textures that I talked about in the first example image.

Note that even the glass has had a distressed texture applied to it. This consistency is very important, if even one of the textures you apply to an object looks new then the object will not read as something old, but as something with disjointed textures applied to it!

I will come back to this image in a later article as an example of diegetic affordances, but for now, take note of the aged look created with mottled color and the white ‘dust’ that is coating the bottom of the ‘mobile’ kiosk. I use quotes around ‘dust’ and ‘mobile’ as that is paint not dust, and the kiosk is not actually mobile. By using a paint spray that matches the color of the ground that the kiosk is placed on the impression that the object moves and kicks up the local dust is created. Also, note the metal discoloration on the trashcan. The trashcan is brand new and the oxidization is artificial selling the age of the space even in the small details.

All of the above techniques are on display in the above wall. The wall is not made of brick, it did not ever have a plaster coating, and the mural was never complete. The impression of age is extreme here in Animal Kingdom going beyond that found in Galaxy's Edge and creating a feeling of Ruins. The murals both provide cultural context and indicate that this space has importance. The second is indicated because a random wall would not have a mural, so this is an important public space of some kind, perhaps a temple. This wall moves from something that is textured to being an example of embedded and environmental storytelling which I will discuss in the next article.

This is an interesting example of how to deal with a set of abrupt transitions. Even in this instance where the visitor is transitioning abruptly from one Land to another (from Galaxy’s Edge to Hollywood Studios proper) care is taken to make the transition feel ‘real.’ In this case, ‘real’ just means that these spaces have been literally smashed up against each other… of course all of these walls were created at the same time and the jagged overlap is intentional. In a game, a technique like this might be used in a city or in ruins that have been built over many times.

Here in Epcot center reflective and gloss textures are used to create a futuristic feeling, colors are used to evoke the planets the spheres represent, and sweeping breaks in the concrete break up the space while echoing the orbits of the planets. (As a personal note, getting this shot with no people in it took some time!)

Lastly lets look at the textures used on Spaceship Earth in Epcot Center. The sphere itself is created with a glossy texture that has enough reflectivity to accentuate the triangles on its surface so that even from a great distance it reads as something created from triangles, not as a smooth sphere. Secondly mirrored panels are used on the wall to create the impression that the base of the sphere is smaller than it actually is.

Once again this article has become long before the topic is exhausted. I will write another article where I dig into some more advanced applications of texture like decoration, embedded and environmental narrative, and some of Christopher Alexander's 15 Properties of Wholeness like ‘roughness’. Until next time…