Gameplay design and development supersedes Level design, but you do need to think about your game world during the development phase.
Fully scope your project before starting your project. Details matter!! Refactoring across 30 classes and subsystems sucks. This can kill a project!
example “Idea Scope”
32-64 player shooter game that uses projectiles vs hitscan. Max player to player interaction distance is 1Km. Players will have inventory in which they pickup/drop items in the game world. Players can loot dead enemy players. Weapons are customizable (stock, optics, grips, muzzle). There will be doors, elevators, destructible assets, and other networked interactions. May have vehicles (cars, trucks, boats).
This would eventually be broke down into a further detailed outline. The more attention you apply here will save to 10x time down the road.
World Design
Overall it depends deeply on the genre and whether its multiplayer or not.
Single player (SP) will rely 100% on the clients system. Much like a Listen Server host, SP is the server. It will be loading into memory more assets and NPC/Bots will be managed by it.
With Multiplayer (MP) the Server itself loads the entire game world and every asset. It handles NPC’s, Replication, Game Mode and State. Clients only ever load a small % based on the characters net work cull distance and world partition Loading Range and Cell size. If using World composition, then its Streaming level distance (equiv to WP’s Loading Range, but it applies to the entire sub level).
Let’s take PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds (PuBG) as an example. It’s a 100 player Battle Royale survival shooter. Maps range from 3x3Km (9^2) up to 8x8Km (64^2). There are over 200 different pickup items that players can loot and utilize. In a large map there will be roughly 50K of these interactive loot items for the players to interact with. Then there’s doors, breakable windows and other destructible assets, vehicles etc. All of which the server has loaded into memory. This means the server has to be dedicated and has to be very very resource robust. Large maps a lone site around 16GB a piece. That equates to a lot of memory usage regardless the server not rendering. Games like this typically cannot run on a listen server setup.
How much fidelity your world has depends on the above factors and what the sight and play range is for your characters. For open world you generally will have 7Km+ sight lines. Assets at that distance need to be loaded and rendered, but they do not need LoD 0 detail.
When it comes to Nanite you need to fully understand what it is and more importantly what it isn’t. It’s great for Large High poly assets… 500,000K +. You don’t use it on small assets (decor) or anything Foliage based unless its a single asset and meets the high poly threshold.
Foliage… trees, bushes, grass, flowers, scree, debris etc should use traditional LoD’s. At least 4 lods per asset. Use all 3 placement approaches. Grass types in landscape material, Procedural Foliage Spawner (volume based), and Foliage Mode (painting foliage to surface).
Nanite Foliage in UE5.7 looks promising. Until it’s out of preview I’d recommend traditional LoD based foliage.
While I’m on the topic of foliage I want to note that you do not use Transparency. Use Masks! There’s a loss in fine detail on the edges when using masks (no Anti-Aliasing), but you don’t get hit with overdraw. A bit of a cheat here is to use a different material for LoD0 that uses transparency, while 1-3 uses masks. Definitely make adjustments to your LoD Distance Screen Size.
Once you have the mechanics developed you can start scoping your game world. I typically start with water ways (rivers, lakes, ocean front), then roads and major obstructions like non-passable mountain steep hill terrain. Then I determine where large settlements/compounds will be, then filler compounds, then small singular buildings, camp sites. Novelty/easter egg and scenic locations are last.
Organized Folders in the World Outliner go a very long way!
Underscore prefix tends to sort to the top, then alphabetically.
e.g. _Atmosphere
White block these areas, then do a sculpting landscape pass. Just a rough pass. Rough in the landscape materials, grass types etc. Then do a detail pass.
Start modeling the compounds. Get them to their final layout. Then you can finish the landscape and foliage passes. Don’t forget to remove foliage assets under your compounds and roads. Use the Foliage Mode “Erase” to get rid of grass type and painted foliage.
