World Building pipeline of Dying Light 2
Łukasz Burdka
Techland, Lead Technology Programmer
- When:
- 15.07.2022, 15:00–16:00
- Hall:
- Yellow Sea Hall (production)
One of the most distinctive features of Dying Light 2 is the vast city of Villedor tightly packed with content. I’m going to tell you a story about the technology that brought The City to life. The audience will learn what tools we used, how they evolved during the production of Dying Light 2 and how we used them to create a believable and fun to play urban environment. I will tell how we leveraged procedural generation and how we combined it with classic map building techniques. I will also share my insight what went well and what lessons we learned when creating the world of Dying Light 2.
What the talk is about
Łukasz Burdka explains how Techland built the world of Dying Light 2, a huge, densely packed city. Because of the scale and constant changes to the city's shape, the team created City Builder: a top-down 2D plan based on a road network, procedurally filled with buildings, roads, decor and nature from prefabs and rules, including rules for rooftop parkour. Pure procedural generation lacked a handcrafted feel, quests and fun gameplay, so the team moved to a hybrid approach: unique "pin lock" locations, persisting areas for manual building edits, and finally freezing the map. His main takeaway: the team needed semi-procedural generation, algorithms cannot replace level designers, yet a hybrid enables fast prototyping. The Q&A touches on AI navigation and nightly bot tests. Useful for tools programmers, level designers and open-world builders.