Thought i would post this out of interest.
I learned a hard lesson. Spent a lot of time doing level design. My fault was doing the game prototype in normal scale (human size) and then once i have my assets which are figurines (10 cm x 5 cm) i can just pop in the new characters in the new level.
I quickly learned this was a major mistake and the following reasons are good enough to rather approuch something like this the opposite. Leave your character big and just scale your world up.
lighting looks differently
shadows misbehave when everything is super small
navmesh cannot build on such small scale
gravity and physics starts behaving very differently
That being said i was wondering if i missed the general rule of thumb to never work in such small scale?
It is actually quiet obvious not to. Its only after the fact when i saw all the issues that it became apparent.
Hopefully this helps someone else who was considering doing real world scale on micro objects.
I don’t think there is an official policy as such, but you do start to run into technical issues if you start to scale the game in extreme ways.
My rule of thumb generally is to keep the player size within certain boundaries, and then if I need them smaller or bigger compared to the world then I start to scale the world accordingly.
At real extremes, you then have to start implementing workarounds for engine limitations, but for your purposes it should be enough to have the player “normal” sized and then scale the world 10x up.
So if you would do a real world scale in cm’s then you would be find so a person 6 foot you would make 182 or 183 cm’s
a person 5’9" would be 175cm something 12 feet high would be 365 cm?