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In designing good scenes for creative works, I had noticed that the logical strategy is often the artist will build their creation off real establishments while secondarily using their imagination to nudge the concepts into uncharted territory and provide a fresh experience to viewers. For me, it is a fun experience to entertain the possible selections for that first step, choosing a good backdrop in which to start creating. I would like to discuss a few notable places that I enjoyed thinking about the most in game level development, and just in general as a novice to the realm of creative design.
Hotels are a flexible backdrop which offer an open-ended solution to working with creating complex, interesting environments: their concept and framework leaves room for creative license or variation in designs while keeping the feel grounded in an air of realism. This building is one of many public structures which were designed to accommodate large numbers of people, with such a purpose providing a common characteristic to them all: the variety of spaces featured in such a location allow you to work comfortably in creating feelings of social relation, whether through matters of congregation, interpersonal tensions, or an absence of any such feeling. Building on this base, their commonly associated air of elegance is always refreshing while remaining a controlled, more mild tone of colour so as not to overwork the viewer's processing. Common rooms/areas like courtyards, hallways, and lobbies contrast extremely well with closed off areas such as suites, restaurants, and lounges to give your works more dimension. Note that this should not imply a set of guidelines for what to implement yourself, but rather the opposite, where a hotel's more vague concept allows any sort of amenity to be conjured up by the artist while remaining thematically relevant. With enough creativity, hotel scenes have great potential to stand out as riveting locations fit for any type of action.
From the games I had recently played, here are a few hotel settings I can recall:
Hitman’s last mission finds Agent 47 infiltrating a corporation’s playplace: a secretive facility to treat powerful clients tucked atop a snowy mountain in Hokkaido, Japan. The building consists of two sections with the main facility being a hospital currently holding 47’s two targets, complemented by a resort to contain guests. The canon level has 47 start outside of the premises to worm his way inside both the locked down hospital and the sparsely populated hotel, where one target is undergoing preparation for a surgery and the other is enjoying leisure time within the hotel.
This resort is split into 2 merged subsections, with the constant and sudden intersections inviting the presence of guards, therefore requiring careful planning to navigate through on harder difficulties. As is the game’s specialty, the NPC’s dialogue and behavior are made to feel very realistic, where in your objective of maintaining stealth, they cannot be disregarded: any crimes must be planned and performed in solitude lest you raise the alarm. The spaces are breathable, but with perimeters close enough to remind you of the threats present. With the hotel featuring amenities like a sushi bar, smoking lounge, outside garden, and games room, the immersion this world provides is top notch and is much assisted by the degree of detail put into the building’s design aspects. IO Interactive have done well in creating a fusion of different themes to form a cold, ‘bleeding edge’ facility which feels as though the objective is being chased in conflict with the thrum of an elite power.
Four survivors. Again. A quickly pitched evacuation center now about to crumble, the Vannah Hotel is where your group of Survivors are left to die when their escape helicopter abandons them on the rooftop of a burning flat filled with Infecteds. This is where the game’s first story campaign ‘Dead Center’ starts, where you all must fight to escape the building in a dash for salvation, navigating the floors filled with LFD’s iconic zombies, rushing to get loot and ward off attackers through collapsing infrastructure.
Although the hotel itself isn’t very memorable, This pilot level and its room designs still shine as a bright example of how design choices can be fluidly chosen and incorporated to fit the directives of play. Floors on floors of closed, turning spaces and wild hordes force your team of 4 to work in tandem in order to survive an onslaught by both enemies and environment, where the numerous rooms provide an aspect of repetition to continuously introduce large numbers of zombie spawns while variance in room designs on each floor keep the player focused on cutting through the angles to clear sections for loot or danger while select obstructions keep the players guided in this snaking space. The first floor has smaller packs of mobs for you to discover while opening the various suite doors, while the later floors are found completely set on fire, making players manage a chaos of mob combat while searching for alternative pathways to descend the stories. Combine these aspects with the classic enemies of the series, and you have the swell introduction to a genre-defining FPS of the 2000s.
Picture a clear summer day. The air is laden with a tropic hue, and birds call out in echoing chirps as you step out of your luxurious 1-bedroom, and into the chilled hallway where an elevator awaits. Ready with your swimming shorts, you squint as the sun from the sprawling deck hits your eyes and the sun washes down on your back….
‘resortmadness’ is a gorgeous map created by user Nita on Steam for the game Garry’s Mod. Gmod is a sandbox engine based off of Half-Life that has been the internet standard for a hub of creative design, game scripting and overall innovation. This particular map traces its roots to the Gmod Tower, an old custom server featuring multiplayer activities for users to relax and hang out with. That map introduced the era to a new realm of design for bringing comfort to online, party game spaces, and this one is no different.
The whole structure is built around a large-open air pool with winding decks and a lot of ornamentation. On one side of the decks lie the changing rooms and an entrance to the tower lobby, where a block of stylistic apartments await if you climb to the second floor. On the other side, you can dry your feet and head into the carpeted hallway containing the resort’s rooms. Other pathways may lead to an elevator (the connection to the map’s Prophunt playerspawn), a VIP room with an easter egg, and a luminescent cavern pool with a tunnel to the outside deck.
This video is lacking in depth compared to the experience of actual play, and the shaders featured may not be to invididual taste. I recommend you download gmod and explore the infinite number of amazing, player-created maps yourself.
As soon as you spawn, you can tell an utmost love has been invested into the finest details of the world. And if not love, craftsmanship. The spaces featured are varying, with smooth entrances to each sector and an intricate blending of areas; nothing is typical, with every turn demanding your attention to admire the architecture. The air of a serene, warm scene possesses the viewer with a conviction that even real-life hotels may fail to replicate; one may find a great peace in choosing to turn off their HUD, and relax in any one of the common zones. This work truly is a love letter, and does an above-and-beyond job in being a space where players are fully immersed, and in high spirits all can socialize and go about their days. Experiences like these are what took the internet from being pictures on a screen, to an infinite series of realms to explore.
Though all these examples provide ingenious techniques to practicing your basic design principles with more advanced work, their lessons do not satisfy the standard we should aim for (especially as hotels are not commonly seen in many hallmark games, or ones which are chosen to feature more complexity). These picks may be especially underwhelming if your focus was truly to build a compelling, multilayered environment with the other components centering around this. When building scenes around the rudiment of existing structures as such, you should make sure in addition to the selection of an interesting base ‘building’, you build an assortment of connections to elements within the scene which your characters must interact with in order to progress the story. Even as a novice, I can identify that it isn’t sufficient to develop the characters and controller mechanics while in a foreign domain which has no relation to their situation: a developed background with facets which pop out and demand an effort to be seen by the viewers is one which truly shows mastery. These are the ideas I will keep in mind as a novice in this field myself; I look forward to working on such art in the future.
Hotels are a flexible backdrop which offer an open-ended solution to working with creating complex, interesting environments: their concept and framework leaves room for creative license or variation in designs while keeping the feel grounded in an air of realism. This building is one of many public structures which were designed to accommodate large numbers of people, with such a purpose providing a common characteristic to them all: the variety of spaces featured in such a location allow you to work comfortably in creating feelings of social relation, whether through matters of congregation, interpersonal tensions, or an absence of any such feeling. Building on this base, their commonly associated air of elegance is always refreshing while remaining a controlled, more mild tone of colour so as not to overwork the viewer's processing. Common rooms/areas like courtyards, hallways, and lobbies contrast extremely well with closed off areas such as suites, restaurants, and lounges to give your works more dimension. Note that this should not imply a set of guidelines for what to implement yourself, but rather the opposite, where a hotel's more vague concept allows any sort of amenity to be conjured up by the artist while remaining thematically relevant. With enough creativity, hotel scenes have great potential to stand out as riveting locations fit for any type of action.
From the games I had recently played, here are a few hotel settings I can recall:
HITMAN (2016): The GAMA Hospital
Hitman’s last mission finds Agent 47 infiltrating a corporation’s playplace: a secretive facility to treat powerful clients tucked atop a snowy mountain in Hokkaido, Japan. The building consists of two sections with the main facility being a hospital currently holding 47’s two targets, complemented by a resort to contain guests. The canon level has 47 start outside of the premises to worm his way inside both the locked down hospital and the sparsely populated hotel, where one target is undergoing preparation for a surgery and the other is enjoying leisure time within the hotel.
This resort is split into 2 merged subsections, with the constant and sudden intersections inviting the presence of guards, therefore requiring careful planning to navigate through on harder difficulties. As is the game’s specialty, the NPC’s dialogue and behavior are made to feel very realistic, where in your objective of maintaining stealth, they cannot be disregarded: any crimes must be planned and performed in solitude lest you raise the alarm. The spaces are breathable, but with perimeters close enough to remind you of the threats present. With the hotel featuring amenities like a sushi bar, smoking lounge, outside garden, and games room, the immersion this world provides is top notch and is much assisted by the degree of detail put into the building’s design aspects. IO Interactive have done well in creating a fusion of different themes to form a cold, ‘bleeding edge’ facility which feels as though the objective is being chased in conflict with the thrum of an elite power.
Left for Dead II: The Vannah
Four survivors. Again. A quickly pitched evacuation center now about to crumble, the Vannah Hotel is where your group of Survivors are left to die when their escape helicopter abandons them on the rooftop of a burning flat filled with Infecteds. This is where the game’s first story campaign ‘Dead Center’ starts, where you all must fight to escape the building in a dash for salvation, navigating the floors filled with LFD’s iconic zombies, rushing to get loot and ward off attackers through collapsing infrastructure.
Although the hotel itself isn’t very memorable, This pilot level and its room designs still shine as a bright example of how design choices can be fluidly chosen and incorporated to fit the directives of play. Floors on floors of closed, turning spaces and wild hordes force your team of 4 to work in tandem in order to survive an onslaught by both enemies and environment, where the numerous rooms provide an aspect of repetition to continuously introduce large numbers of zombie spawns while variance in room designs on each floor keep the player focused on cutting through the angles to clear sections for loot or danger while select obstructions keep the players guided in this snaking space. The first floor has smaller packs of mobs for you to discover while opening the various suite doors, while the later floors are found completely set on fire, making players manage a chaos of mob combat while searching for alternative pathways to descend the stories. Combine these aspects with the classic enemies of the series, and you have the swell introduction to a genre-defining FPS of the 2000s.
Garry’s Mod: The Loft Tower and Resort
Picture a clear summer day. The air is laden with a tropic hue, and birds call out in echoing chirps as you step out of your luxurious 1-bedroom, and into the chilled hallway where an elevator awaits. Ready with your swimming shorts, you squint as the sun from the sprawling deck hits your eyes and the sun washes down on your back….
‘resortmadness’ is a gorgeous map created by user Nita on Steam for the game Garry’s Mod. Gmod is a sandbox engine based off of Half-Life that has been the internet standard for a hub of creative design, game scripting and overall innovation. This particular map traces its roots to the Gmod Tower, an old custom server featuring multiplayer activities for users to relax and hang out with. That map introduced the era to a new realm of design for bringing comfort to online, party game spaces, and this one is no different.
The whole structure is built around a large-open air pool with winding decks and a lot of ornamentation. On one side of the decks lie the changing rooms and an entrance to the tower lobby, where a block of stylistic apartments await if you climb to the second floor. On the other side, you can dry your feet and head into the carpeted hallway containing the resort’s rooms. Other pathways may lead to an elevator (the connection to the map’s Prophunt playerspawn), a VIP room with an easter egg, and a luminescent cavern pool with a tunnel to the outside deck.
This video is lacking in depth compared to the experience of actual play, and the shaders featured may not be to invididual taste. I recommend you download gmod and explore the infinite number of amazing, player-created maps yourself.
As soon as you spawn, you can tell an utmost love has been invested into the finest details of the world. And if not love, craftsmanship. The spaces featured are varying, with smooth entrances to each sector and an intricate blending of areas; nothing is typical, with every turn demanding your attention to admire the architecture. The air of a serene, warm scene possesses the viewer with a conviction that even real-life hotels may fail to replicate; one may find a great peace in choosing to turn off their HUD, and relax in any one of the common zones. This work truly is a love letter, and does an above-and-beyond job in being a space where players are fully immersed, and in high spirits all can socialize and go about their days. Experiences like these are what took the internet from being pictures on a screen, to an infinite series of realms to explore.
Though all these examples provide ingenious techniques to practicing your basic design principles with more advanced work, their lessons do not satisfy the standard we should aim for (especially as hotels are not commonly seen in many hallmark games, or ones which are chosen to feature more complexity). These picks may be especially underwhelming if your focus was truly to build a compelling, multilayered environment with the other components centering around this. When building scenes around the rudiment of existing structures as such, you should make sure in addition to the selection of an interesting base ‘building’, you build an assortment of connections to elements within the scene which your characters must interact with in order to progress the story. Even as a novice, I can identify that it isn’t sufficient to develop the characters and controller mechanics while in a foreign domain which has no relation to their situation: a developed background with facets which pop out and demand an effort to be seen by the viewers is one which truly shows mastery. These are the ideas I will keep in mind as a novice in this field myself; I look forward to working on such art in the future.
