The Unofficial Free Radical Design blog

A new post on the HAZE blog describes the environments in HAZE:

Hello.

Beating a man to death with the butt of your rifle is great family fun. The same goes for shooting a guy’s legs out from under him and watching his nightmarishly gored corpse splat down face-first into the dust. However, just because you’ll be brutalizing thousands of people in Haze, doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it somewhere pretty, right?

As I’m sure you know by now, there are no loading screens in Haze. Once you’ve booted up the game, you can play the entire ten hour single player or four-player co-op campaign without ever seeing a mission select or loading screen. The whole game is one big seamless, streaming experience. So, whilst there aren’t ‘levels’ in the conventional sense, you will be traveling through twelve unique environments in Haze. From a lush sunny jungle, to the freezing heights of a mountain top, to a huge cargo ship, to the Promise Hand village in the midst of a tropical storm - each of the environments are hand-made to order by our wonderful Artists.

The production of a level begins with a rough block out to determine the scale and playable areas. We then gather reference material and produce concept art to help visualize the space and what could fill it. Maya is used as the primary building tool for our levels with use from MudBox, Nvtools and Photoshop for creating textures. We light our levels using an in house radiosity rendering system that we have named Bacon. Once our levels come back from the render farm we set about creating particle effects and scene settings. These give the level a final lift and set the mood and atmosphere.

Each of the environments was carefully designed not only to maximize combat intensity, but also emotional intensity. Meaning that in the story, when things are going well, the sun will be out; warming you and generally keeping you cheery. However, when things are going bad, the rain clouds roll in, and the situation will feel all-the-more desperate. Of course, things get a little scary when the sun goes down, but equally the sunrise signifies a new hope. See?

The idea of having the locations reflect the mood of the story is common practice in movies, but is still quite unusual in games. Hopefully it’ll set us apart a bit and help hammer home the story all-the-more.

Our design and art teams work on levels together right from the concept stage, developing ideas for everything from the way set pieces play out to the types of wildlife that inhabit that environment. Each designer then blocks out the level, dropping in enemies and items and checking it plays as sweetly as possible, before an artist gets out their box of crayons and polishes the level up to finished quality.

By having an artist working hand-in-hand with a designer the whole way through, we can ensure that the environment doesn’t just look pretty – but that it plays pretty too.

So there you have it. Lock, load and get ready to murder strangers in some truly delightful surroundings.
Source: http://blogs.ign.com/HazeGame/2008/04/08/86227/