
Heyo Everyone,
Welcome to a series of dev blogs called Darktide 101. We’re interviewing different devs working on Darktide to share what it’s like to create the game. These dev blogs will include topics like level design and cinematics, voice acting and audio, and more (based on your suggestions)! For today’s blog, we’re starting with level design and cinematics for Darktide. This is currently an introduction to these topics, because there is truly so much to talk about. If players are interested, we’d love to talk more about taking a mission to functional, adding in the art and audio cues, lighting and iteration, etc. Let us know!Level Design
While creating a level in Darktide always follows a well established production process - a production blueprint if you will - each new level brings its own set of challenges and creative opportunities. We think of ways to innovate and improve within the experience players have come to expect, for the sake of consistency. You may also have noticed we sometimes make changes to previously released levels after looking at how players interact with them. Before we begin laying the foundation for a level, we take a step back and define the backstory and narrative for a mission. We ask questions like: What kind of location was it before current-day events? Is there a specific reason for Chaos forces to be there now? What is the Warbands’ (or other parties..) interest in it? One typical question we always try to justify is: why couldn't Masozi simply fly us to the end of the level from the get-go? After answering these questions, we begin with a paper design of the mission, known as the Mission Design Document (MDD). The MDD becomes the blueprint for the mission, outlining how we envision it playing out. It includes detailed descriptions of every part of the mission, ensuring everyone on the team has a clear idea of the mission's flow. The MDD details:- The Plot: A short summary of the plot of the mission.
- The Setting: A detailed description of which part of the Hive the mission takes place and the different areas we intend the players to go through.
- Game Mechanics: The types of game mechanics we intend to use during the mission. Particularly how we envision the event in the mission to play and how we intend to challenge the players during the events.
- Mission Areas: Descriptions of different areas within the mission, which we call “chunks.”










Cinematics
Hi everyone, I’m Tim. I worked with cinematics during the development of Darktide. I’m here to write a small rundown of how we make cinematics in Darktide! Of course, every cutscene starts with a bunch of planning, but I’ll skip that part for the sake of brevity. After planning, the first step we do in-engine is prototyping; we make a really ugly prototype to test out how things flow and if the script fits our planned shots. Once we have a prototype we feel okay with, we iterate on it. We add VFX, animations, character art, finetune the cameras and add audio (though not necessarily in that order). Here’s an early prototype we made for the first cutscene in the Prologue (it’s very WIP to show you what the first iteration looks like for cinematics): https://youtu.be/TOQM-bxNE_c Since Darktide was still in the middle of being developed when creating this prototype, some things were gradually added as they were finished for other parts of the game. For example, we didn’t have the unit for the Poxburster until a bit further into production, so we used a WIP Poxwalker as a stand-in for this first prototype. We use a visual programming system, called Flow, for most of the VFX and audio triggers. Essentially, we set up a sequence of animations and position keys, with some pretty simple scripting to trigger VFX and audio throughout a cutscene. Here’s a quick example of what a part of the first cutscene in the prologue looks like within our editor (see the screenshot) as well as outside the editor (see the video). (Note: This prototype is without the VFX we added later).
