MotorStorm

MotorStorm: Building Monument Valley

When MotorStorm was first unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005, it demonstrated a new level of detail for racing environments and gave us some idea of what we could look forward to on next-generation hardware. The dirt tracks that populate the game take their cue from the famous Monument Valley in Utah, North America. With a mix of dirt surfaces, sweeping canyons, and rock formations, the immense area should be a familiar sight to people who have seen such films as Back to the Future III and Thelma & Louise. While it was also featured in Namco's first Tekken game, this area hasn't been used so extensively as a backdrop for a game, let alone modelled in as much detail, as it is in MotorStorm. On a recent visit to see developer Evolution Studios, we sat down with the game's art manager, David Wilson, to see how they went about re-creating Monument Valley in digital form.

When MotorStorm was in its conceptual stage, the designers happened upon Monument Valley and fell in love with its dramatic scale and extreme environments. After choosing it as a location to use in-game, the team headed to Monument Valley to gather research, take footage, and soak up its natural beauty for inspiration. Overseen by studio head Martin Kenwright (whom you can hear from in our interview), the project was led by a team of creative directors who would have their ideas fleshed out by the design team. Because MotorStorm was developed as a new game for a brand-new piece of hardware, the team concentrated on building custom tools for the job.

During our visit, we got to see some of these tools that Evolution used to build the game, as well as a demonstration of those tools on the first of the game's new downloadable tracks. Entering the Coyote Revenge track in debug mode, our first demonstration was on the lighting and background design. Wilson was quick to declare that MotorStorm's surroundings are not simply flat images--they are 3D models that stretch right out into the horizon. This means that the lighting isn't fixed in one place as with some previous-generation titles, but rather the placement of the sun can be altered in real time. The in-game shading engine shifts and alters according to the placement of the light, which means that entire sections of a canyon can be lit up or plunged into shade. The game features such uneven terrain that the lighting of the bumps and crevices makes all the difference, something which the graphic designers have taken into account when tuning the difficulty of each track.

While this power makes it easy to subtly fine-tune each track, the tools that have been custom-built for the game allowed the team to create the tracks themselves very quickly. The graphics toolset, Maya, gives the same detailed view of the terrain as the in-game engine itself, and layering techniques are used to build up different surfaces with mere strokes of the designer's mouse. Levels of different material can be painted as if they were real surfaces within Maya, such as a top layer of packed dirt that degrades down to gravel and then claylike mud. Vehicles that drive over these surfaces will displace layers, which may lead to a more mudlike appearance by the final lap in a race.

Given the different characteristics offered by the vehicles in the game, the interplay between the track and vehicle is the main way in which MotorStorm feels like a truly next-generation title. Specifically, heavy trucks can part the mud and cause bumps that are difficult for smaller vehicles to navigate. The trucks can also smash into solid debris and disperse the debris across the track, in turn causing bikers and buggies to crash. This meant that it was necessary to extensively test the tracks to balance them for use with multiple vehicles, and the designers compared the ordeal to having to design seven different tracks at a time. The studio's background in racing games (with the World Rally Championship series on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2) gave it some experience in this area, but the studio still had to work with many different types of rock when designing the tracks to make them feel as authentic as possible.

While the tracks in MotorStorm seem to have been designed specifically to show off the spectacular crashes that the physics engine is capable of producing, they undoubtedly capture Monument Valley in all its natural glory. From a development point of view, the tools that Evolution built seem to have succeeded in making PlayStation 3 games manageable, even if they are only one part of the development puzzle that also includes physics, artificial intelligence, and vehicle design. You can read our full review of the game here, and be sure to check out our world-building video feature to find out more, directly from Evolution Studios' David Wilson.

Gamespot