Trigger Happy
valleys and rivulets. Block by block, the ground is raised and lowered; edges are smoothed off.
Only then, when the landscape is shaped in three dimensions, do the artists start to color it in, choosing from a palette of colors and textures (endless pages of sun-bleached grass, clover patches, subtly different shades of rock) that are simply painted on to the wireframe model. Meanwhile, other artists have been fashioning animals out of their digital version of the Promethean clay. A cow is fashioned from a geometrical skeleton, painstakingly animated through hundreds of frames, and then “skinned”—not flayed, but given a skin, a colorful cartoon cowhide that is wrapped over the wireframe model. Now the worldbuilder simply chooses the incantatory menu option “Place Object”: the cow is sucked out of its virtual womb, fully formed, and dropped into the field. With no apparent signs of confusion or disorientation, the bovine simply starts padding around the grass, enjoying a nonexistent sun. Inside the game: life, of a sort.
A world can’t be built in isolation. Every facet of the videogame development process is organically interrelated with the requirements of the others. For this game, an artist explains, “The early levels are all
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