Video game doors may seem easy to make, but In fact, they represent one of the most challenging design elements for developers.. A door as a worker, contrary to what one might think, is the one that nobody remembers. A huge, beautiful, and well-animated door is easily appreciated, but there is much more to manage beyond the purely aesthetic aspect. A door in a digital environment should fit perfectly into your context as any gamer would expect, as if it were a door in real life.
Ports are often the biggest problem during development, sometimes generating annoying bugs that developers need to fix. For example some doors tend to magically open; In third person games, for example, the character on duty must reach for the handle and push it. In first person games, on the other hand, it is easier since you only need to animate the door and not the character. Another complaint is handling the doors while running., for example during an escape in which the player wants to lock himself inside a room. These situations in fact, they require a greater number of animations and they are more difficult for developers to manage.
Better a closed door than an open door
Some developers even to avoid complications. prefer to include non-interactive ports in their video games, that is, without animations. In some cases these are used only to advance in the levels of the game, so once closed they remain that way. After all they are an integral part of the design of a video game, they can act as a cover during a fight, they can create tension in a horror game or as mentioned above they can represent a progress indicator perhaps after the defeat of a certain boss or after having solved a puzzle.
The doors are, therefore, a complex object to reproduce faithfully, but absolutely important in a video game. However, they are not the only elements that developers have to deal with, Seemingly innocuous items such as strings and mirrors are also added to the list.. Some developers also mentioned alcohol bottles, stairs, elevators, and moving platforms. The reason always lies in the interaction with these design elements, as the player expects something very similar to real life, something that in certain objects is not easily replicable within a digital world.
PhD credit: Dark Souls (Bandai Namco)
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