Level Design Workshop: Blockmesh and Lighting Tips

In this 2018 GDC talk, Naughty Dog's David Shaver and NYU professor Robert Yang share techniques that developers like Respawn and Naughty Dog use to establish natural level flow via blockmesh design, environment art, FX, audio and scripting, and delve into one of the most important yet often overlooked means of understanding levels: light.

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[vennril]

The first half might be one of my favorite GDC talks ever. Dense, no filler, and lots of examples from all kinds of games.
Blocking is one of the things that you might not even notice as a player unless it's broken, so this is some really good insight. I see a lot of indie devs obsessing over creating assets, tweaking lighting and post-processing effects etc before they even blocked the level.

[Amelia_PC]

Man, I'll never take lightly blockout anymore, the most timesaver resource for a level designing. Thanks for updating this video!

[harrysanders]

I especially love the second talk about lighting. It so well condenses the incredibly complex topic of lighting in games. Yang is a great guy. It was a masterful and entertaining presentation which I always like to rewatch every now and then.

[markyap]

Love the first half of this video. David Shaver has a very informative take on the subject. Well done

[linezgames]

This is sooo fricking SMART.... This should 100% be used in Open world games which many dont actually do. Denial Affordance and Regular Affordance needs to be demonstrated more in many games.

[LiamSwiftTheDog]

I followed the course by Emilia Schatz from Naughty Dog (CGMA), and this presentation is a very good summary of it all

[MsJeffreyF]

The first talk is very much basic painting/composition/art stuff, like 90% of it. Really emphasizes to me the importance of the fundamentals

[majort]

Great talk! who wouldn't want to get pro tips from a Naughty Dog employee! Well done GDC

[thehelencheng]

Came for Bob Ross, stayed for the slides. <3 Will immediately apply this to my next level!
By the way, the door example is famously called a "Norman door". Check Don Norman out!

[the_kindman]

and here i am turning the traversal difficulty of shadow of the tomb raider to hard, in order to get rid of those visual cues for climable areas. did i die because of misjumps regularly? sure. but i also felt much more accomplished when i reached a tricky spot. so what i am saying is: there is a flip side to affordance.

[teamakesgames]

Robert Yang:
- in Unity do _this_
- and in Unreal _do that_
- (and if you use Source, you're f#%ked because you have to use lightmaps and compile everytime you want to see changes)

[ricklu]

Was this in San Francisco? Would like to know the conference's location to citate it on a thesis

[uguraksu]

Second half is fucking awesome. Boundaries of this medium is expanding thanks to people like Robert.

[EatinBubsy]

David Shaver has the greatest forehead in the industry

[joaquin_]

what a mess with the audio in every GC conference

[computron]

It's mindblowing that the person who talks about light being political doesn't know that one of his presentation examples is from "Schindler's List".

[fy]

I like how a single line flew completely past the usual whiny gamer squad, causing their usual shrieking. Nothing seems to trigger gamers more than a single word.

Great talk, for both halves.

[ghstproject]

First 28 minutes are amazing second half some random dude talking about gay sex... what the fuck am i watching

[alexanderdragian]

The first talk was fantastic. The second talk started very unprofessional. It is not professional to ask in a conference for your audience to cheer for sex, no matter what type.

[Viscte]

Ill be saving the first talk and creating a cheat sheet from it. Lets just say i shut off the video not long after the first talk