Third-Party is a series of guest blogs where developers talk about specific games, mechanics, levels, and more. This week we have Didi Satzinger, art director at Frictional Games, chatting about the joy of maps.
Hi, I am David “Didi” Satzinger and work as an art director and visdev at Frictional Games. You might have seen some of my work in Soma, Amnesia: Rebirth and A Machine for Pigs. Working for a medium-sized independent studio means I got many hats to wear across a lot of visual development tasks, from GUI design to concept art. Originally I come from visdev for TV and advertising with my main craft being that of a communication- and graphic designer.
I love maps. They help you find your way. Obvious, right? They can show you places from a distance and how they are nested within their surroundings. They give you an impression of scale, of the vastness or tightness of an area. They are little helpers to remind you what to do and where to go. But also important to me is how they can enrich your impression of the world through many subtle (and not so subtle) means. My favorite maps keep your brain working, enriching the overall experience.
I am especially fond of maps in games because here, the act of cartography and the act of building the environment itself are tightly knit together and reinforce one another. During development, a map often exists prior to a space, becoming part of the creation itself.
The map and the construct
When you are traveling through a space, your brain is not only (hopefully) appreciating the environment, it also is very busy at work creating a cognitive map of the space you traverse. It memorizes spatial relationships, notes down detailed information about landmarks and tries to simulate how different agents within the space behave in relation to your own position. That is a lot of stuff. So much in fact, that traversing a new space only once is far from enough to get a good grasp of it. Without sufficient repetition your meat computer will not perfectly commit all of that to long-term memory or be able to rapidly tell you the best course of action. This is where in-game maps, the abstract representation of the space, come in.
A map will provide your brain with a different frame of reference, allowing you to see “more at once”, which compliments your cognitive map. Maps usually do this by increasing the contrast or hierarchy of importance within a space. Unimportant things get reduced or removed while everything important gets amplified. With this, you can concentrate on what matters, you can plan ahead.
My favorite kind of map also heightens immersion. This can mean a lot of different things depending on what the intended outcome is. For example, you could play a game that takes place in a mall. Of course, it would be very fitting to have a map that is styled after what the majority of players would expect from a mall plan.
Dead Rising‘s Willamette Parkview Mall map
Or let’s say you are on an epic quest in a distant land where dragons roam? Would it not be cool if your map feels like cartographers of a bygone age inked it on parchment?
Part of the Elden Ring map
I also enjoy maps that keep the “spatial puzzle” active. What I mean are maps that are “faulty” or omit specific information. For example, Kona has a very minimal map that does not feature specific layouts of buildings or forests, meaning you can only confidently plan that far ahead and then deal with what you find (this is a very enjoyable indie mystery title. Go play it!). Control’s maps are self-overlapping or imprecise to the point where they add to the labyrinthine nature of its virtual skyscraper, the Oldest House (and by extension put emphasis on the often confusing nature of old government offices). Or there’s Silent Hill, whose maps will not tell you out of the blue where doors are locked or a street has become impassable until you arrive there and your character starts to jot down notes on the map itself. This keeps your brain engaged. They are more than a checklist. If done well they can also improve immersion. After all, if things become unexciting, your brain is too bored to train its neurological pathways.
Diegetic and non-diegetic maps
Before we continue, we should look at some jargon and technical aspects so we are on the same page going forward (huahuahua…). Sometimes you will see people using the terms diegetic or non-diegetic for design elements in a product. While “diegetic” has different uses, most commonly what people mean when they use it in the context of video games is that the map (or menu, or inventory or what-have-you) would be fully integrated into the world itself. A great example of this is the map in Far Cry 2. It is represented as a piece of paper that your character brings up while the game does not go into pause. Pulling out a tangible object is something your character does as opposed to non-diegetic maps where it is something that exists as a sort of meta-layer, usually opened as an overlay of the screen while background visuals and noises get dimmed or the game itself is paused.
Map of Far Cry 2
Both approaches to a game map have their place depending on design intent (but the first one is not always in the budget since that one often requires a lot more work). For example, Firewatch is all about making you “feel” the place you are in and if the map was on a more abstract layer, it would impact this goal without engaging your cognitive map in interesting ways. On the flip side, the map in a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is intended to give you a fast route to the next point of interest and if it was diegetic and more interested in expanding the spatial puzzle, it would get annoying incredibly fast given the huge amount of activities you have in the world. That world is not designed to be the puzzle in itself.
The map in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
By the way, for the sake of keeping this reasonably short, I will avoid going over minimaps, quest markers and compasses or other forms of navigational aid and only say that they are great tools in the right contexts and if handled well.
Examples
The Last of Us Part II
The Last of Us Part 2‘s downtown Seattle diegetic map
Ever since the creation of Nathan Drake’s sketchbook, Naughty Dog usually has a good hand with diegetic maps. One of my favorite examples is the old, slightly touristy map Ellie uses in the open section of The Last of Us Part 2. Not only are the markings handwritten and slightly vague, it is also a map that predates the apocalypse, long before conflict and nature having changed the environment very significantly. Roads and bridges became impassable. Landmarks collapsed and everything is overgrown with vegetation.
The effect is that you have a map that gives you a rough idea of what you can find at a specific location, but it further engages your brain because you still have to find passable routes. It does make things a little bit easier by showing you your position on the map, generally having workable contrast in darker areas and flashing markings when needed. This is a fairly chill and explorative part of the game and it makes a lot of sense to not have a map you need to fight with.
Some of that early Silent Hill DNA can be found here as well, either by coincidence or as an open homage. Often you do not need to make something unique as long as your map feels “right” in the context of the world, and different people often come to the same conclusions independently from each other.
Death Stranding
Death Stranding‘s map
Now Death Stranding is an interesting case. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. It fits extremely well in the visual conventions of the game and its countless menus. The ability to tilt the map to get an idea of the elevation, the weather reporting and the minimal graphic design are all things I immensely enjoy about this map. Having it as a satellite map is a good idea for this world and it is interesting that there is a companion map showing you the knots you have unlocked all across the former United States, which reinforces the theme of reconnecting society.
On the other hand, there is so much going on that it becomes hard to read. One of the issues I am struggling with is the general size of icons, paths and other hints, mostly in a pale blue, on a satellite map that itself has not a whole lot of contrast but a ton of terrain detail, sort of spindly typefaces, text overlays and some of the environment shining through under it, and more. It is a LOT. It is still workable, but I prefer something more streamlined – the maps in Metal Gear Solid V would have worked better, even though it might not have looked as cool. And it is fine to have a “cool” map more than a perfectly functioning one as this suits the general direction of the title very well. You have to balance things. Making an individual part of your title amazing and flawless in isolation does not mean it will glide well with the rest.
Alien Isolation
A floor plan map from Alien Isolation
Here is an example of a lovely floor plan type of map. I like it because it strikes a good balance between details, simplicity and plausibility. Alien is one of the big classic science fiction franchises and it introduced a lot of visual ideas and brought them into the mainstream. Industrial aesthetics front and center, this map goes for a blueprint-like style with its grid, how notations are incorporated and the very minimal use of color. In keeping with the very lived-in look of the environment, the map screen is also a bit glitchy.
An interesting detail I like to ponder about is that the environments make a lot of use of diagonals. Diagonal lines are something that you will see in a lot of sci-fi but they are often overused or do not make any practical sense. Here it feels natural as it represents the actual shapes of the rooms, while the frame the map sits in does not have the typical diagonally cut corners we are used to in many games and movies.
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind‘s physical map
Morrowind was one of the first games that made me realize I would like to work in a creative field. I made fan art and small mods for it back in the early 2000s. I had this map hanging on the wall over my old computer when I was a teenager and stared at it a lot, letting my imagination wander. A big part of that was because it was a “real” map that I could touch and fold. There is an in-game map that does its job well enough and is critical for orientation, but having something in your hands that gives the illusion of being made by ancient scholars in a fantasy world lets my teenage brain immerse in Morrowind’s world even more vividly. It became part of the act of roleplaying for me.
What is always worth mentioning is how Morrowind deals with directions. There are no quest markers in the game. NPCs give you proper directions like “go north till the crossroad, take a left towards the mountain and you should see a tomb entrance to the south between two big trees.” This leads players to check the map more often and use it like you would use a map before GPS became the norm for everyone.
SOMA
A map I did for SOMA
Here is one of mine I did for SOMA. This must have been in 2013? I honestly can not remember anymore. There is a lot that I would do differently nowadays but it is maybe an interesting case to look at. As you can see, there is a strong influence from Silent Hill maps, red marker and all. What we tried with these maps is less to give the player a tool for orientation but instead, expand the world a little bit. You can not take the maps in the game with you and they usually are in places of narrative significance, rather than pure gameplay significance.
This particular one is found early on in a hideout of two survivors and the red markings are made by them as they tested out where they can go and what rooms they sealed. With this, and other props and events, it hopefully allowed players to reconstruct the past of the environment in richer detail. Nowadays I would have probably done a properly designed fire escape plan and added way more personalized markings on these to make the map feel more authentic.
KHOLAT
The map in Kholat comes with a compass
Kholat is a nice example of how to maximally engage your cognitive map. It is a fairly authentic design and it does not show you where you are (unless you find a camping site) and only hands you a compass. You have to pay close attention to your environment, note where landmarks are, and carefully plan your routes. It works in this game (until it doesn’t since it sure can become frustrating) as losing orientation is the point of it. It is also reasonably short (a longer game would probably tire out its audience too quickly with a map system like this).
Mundaun
Mundaun‘s maps are perfectly in sync with the game’s style
Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to the maps in Mundaun. Everything in this game is drawn with thick and evocative lines (including the textures of the 3D models) so naturally the maps are, too. They are perfectly in sync with the game’s style. On top of that, Mundaun leans into middle European folklore and fairytales. The maps are drawn in a more emotionally true and less spatially true way, similar to old fantasy maps, only with much smaller locations where it makes sense to have a sketch of grandfather’s house or the local church. Everything else, your brain will fill in. Maps in this game are also less for actual orientation as the world is compact enough that most players will fare fairly well without one.
Closing remarks
Maps are an amazing way to enrich the world of a game. They can be a tool to plan your route, a puzzle in their own right and a piece of worldbuilding all at once. They are one of my favorite things to work on when I get the chance. I hope you enjoyed this little excursion and have learned a thing or two.
Personally, what I would like to see one day is a game where you have several maps of the same place but they are all incorrect or focused on different things, and the only way to properly plan what to do next is to compare the differences and learn about the people who created these maps. Maybe one day someone will make a game like that!
Written by Didi Satzinger on behalf of GLHF.
