**Heat Maps: A Tool for Understanding Player Behavior**

We just came from Jim's talk about Unreal Tournament and the community, and we brought up some interesting items that are involved in the development process. One of the topics that was discussed was heat maps. Heat maps are a tool used to visualize player movement on a map, providing valuable insights into how players interact with the game environment.

Heat maps show where players move on a map, creating a top-down representation of the map's topology. Every time a player steps on a spot, it is marked with a light color, allowing designers to see the path that players take as they move through the world. The heat map can also be used to track player deaths, providing information on who killed them and when.

In Gears of War, we used heat maps in a different way. We dropped markers whenever a player died, and then analyzed the data to identify patterns and trends. By tracking player movement and death patterns, we were able to identify areas where players were getting stuck or dying too frequently. This information was crucial in creating a balanced gameplay experience that funneled players into central front lines.

**The Science of Level Design**

Level design is not just about creating a visually appealing space; it's also a science that involves understanding human behavior and computer interaction. By tracking player movement and death patterns, designers can identify areas where the game is failing to engage players. In Unreal Tournament, for example, we noticed that players were struggling with certain aspects of gameplay, such as navigating corners.

The camera position in Gears of War was a major issue. The camera was positioned behind the player's right shoulder, which made it difficult for them to see around corners on their left side. This led to a lot of problems when building levels, as designers had to carefully plan each corner and nook to ensure that players could move safely and easily.

**The Importance of Human Factors in Game Design**

Level design is not just about creating a fun gameplay experience; it's also about understanding how players will interact with the game world. By incorporating human factors into the design process, designers can create games that are intuitive, engaging, and rewarding.

In Unreal Tournament, we're using this approach to create a highly interactive gameplay experience. We're leveraging community feedback and data analysis to inform our design decisions, ensuring that the final product is a true collaboration between the development team and the players themselves.

**Getting Involved with Unreal Tournament**

Unreal Tournament is an actively in-development game that is completely open to community involvement. Anyone can download the game, join the forums, or get involved in the process by contributing their own content or feedback. By leveraging the collective knowledge and creativity of the community, we're confident that we can create a truly exceptional gaming experience.

To learn more about Unreal Tournament, visit unrealtournament.com for the latest updates, downloads, and information on how to get involved.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone this is steve from gamersnexus.net we're at ecgc 2015 the east coast game conference i'm joined by jim brown senior designer at epic games hello everyone and uh we just came from jim's talk about unreal tournament and the community and community involvement and uh you brought up some interesting items that are involved in the development process so you showed heat maps right and can you explain what a heat map is and what it does for you right so we actually started data tracking on gears of war was kind of the first time that we had done that internally and heat maps really just kind of show where people well you can use them in various different ways the example i used in that particular talk i had two up there which was one was showing where players move in a map so it's kind of a top-down look at the topography of the map and it just draws a little light essentially every time somebody steps someplace and so you can see like the path that they take as they move through the world and then it changes color based on how many people or how often that particular spot is visited the other thing that we use them for in gears in particular was to show we just basically drop a marker whenever somebody died and so then we can go back and see how they died who killed them you know all that other type of information but in gears in particular what we were looking for was we were trying to create a very specific type of gameplay that funneled people into kind of a central front in the map so that you could spawn and run in and always the combat was always kind of maintained on that central front um and by tracking player movement and player deaths we could see when that front fell apart and then try and figure out why and how to fix it if it wasn't happening and are there any particular elements in level design that you find players respond almost programmatically to is there if i see a set of stairs am i expected to respond a certain way yeah i mean there's any number of elements um there's all these rules i mean i could spend forever talking about it just about how you group objects together you know whether there's light in a doorway that's in a dark hallway it'll pull people there people's mentally respond different to ramps than they do to stairs for example and just whether someplace looks accessible or not really influences how often they move there there's very very subtle things just in the architecture of a space or nooks and crannies where people can hide that kind of give these visual cues or even um have really dramatic outcomes to uh the way the game unfolds in gears for example our camera was over behind you over your right shoulder and that led to a lot of problems looking around corners because you could swing the camera out around the right but you couldn't do that to the left so that really really influenced the way that we had to build a lot of our spaces because even just building a symmetrical space when you flip it around all the corners that you can look around from one side are now over balanced because the guys on the other side can't see that so it took a lot of work to work through those issues and then again you know in in in first person like we're doing with unreal tournament you know how high the camera is your field of view all of that influences how the world feels when you're moving through it um you have to have your scale correct not only in in terms of like how wide is a door but you know are there visual cues that kind of let the player know how large they are in comparison to the world around them i mean it's like this really kind of cascading thing so there's any number of ways that you could you could tackle that so it sounds like level design as much as it is design is also partly a science it absolutely is and i guess that's one of the reasons we really started doing a lot of the data tracking that we did and really trying to look at it more from not just a pure design perspective a lot of design is actually about human computer interaction and understanding how people react how people interpret and human behavior just in general and um there's a lot of elements that play into that that are more complicated than just making a fun gameplay space very cool so for more information of course unreal tournament is actively in development can you can you direct people where to go for that sure unrealtournament.com it's really easy from there you can download the game you can join our forums you can get involved in the process we're doing this whole new thing that's completely open community development so anybody can get involved just by playing just by reading just by participating or they can dive in full bore and start modeling and programming and designing and doing all things we want to leverage the power of everyone to really make this the best game that we possibly can so unreal tournament.com for more information on that of course gamersnexus.net for the full article and we will see you all next time youhey everyone this is steve from gamersnexus.net we're at ecgc 2015 the east coast game conference i'm joined by jim brown senior designer at epic games hello everyone and uh we just came from jim's talk about unreal tournament and the community and community involvement and uh you brought up some interesting items that are involved in the development process so you showed heat maps right and can you explain what a heat map is and what it does for you right so we actually started data tracking on gears of war was kind of the first time that we had done that internally and heat maps really just kind of show where people well you can use them in various different ways the example i used in that particular talk i had two up there which was one was showing where players move in a map so it's kind of a top-down look at the topography of the map and it just draws a little light essentially every time somebody steps someplace and so you can see like the path that they take as they move through the world and then it changes color based on how many people or how often that particular spot is visited the other thing that we use them for in gears in particular was to show we just basically drop a marker whenever somebody died and so then we can go back and see how they died who killed them you know all that other type of information but in gears in particular what we were looking for was we were trying to create a very specific type of gameplay that funneled people into kind of a central front in the map so that you could spawn and run in and always the combat was always kind of maintained on that central front um and by tracking player movement and player deaths we could see when that front fell apart and then try and figure out why and how to fix it if it wasn't happening and are there any particular elements in level design that you find players respond almost programmatically to is there if i see a set of stairs am i expected to respond a certain way yeah i mean there's any number of elements um there's all these rules i mean i could spend forever talking about it just about how you group objects together you know whether there's light in a doorway that's in a dark hallway it'll pull people there people's mentally respond different to ramps than they do to stairs for example and just whether someplace looks accessible or not really influences how often they move there there's very very subtle things just in the architecture of a space or nooks and crannies where people can hide that kind of give these visual cues or even um have really dramatic outcomes to uh the way the game unfolds in gears for example our camera was over behind you over your right shoulder and that led to a lot of problems looking around corners because you could swing the camera out around the right but you couldn't do that to the left so that really really influenced the way that we had to build a lot of our spaces because even just building a symmetrical space when you flip it around all the corners that you can look around from one side are now over balanced because the guys on the other side can't see that so it took a lot of work to work through those issues and then again you know in in in first person like we're doing with unreal tournament you know how high the camera is your field of view all of that influences how the world feels when you're moving through it um you have to have your scale correct not only in in terms of like how wide is a door but you know are there visual cues that kind of let the player know how large they are in comparison to the world around them i mean it's like this really kind of cascading thing so there's any number of ways that you could you could tackle that so it sounds like level design as much as it is design is also partly a science it absolutely is and i guess that's one of the reasons we really started doing a lot of the data tracking that we did and really trying to look at it more from not just a pure design perspective a lot of design is actually about human computer interaction and understanding how people react how people interpret and human behavior just in general and um there's a lot of elements that play into that that are more complicated than just making a fun gameplay space very cool so for more information of course unreal tournament is actively in development can you can you direct people where to go for that sure unrealtournament.com it's really easy from there you can download the game you can join our forums you can get involved in the process we're doing this whole new thing that's completely open community development so anybody can get involved just by playing just by reading just by participating or they can dive in full bore and start modeling and programming and designing and doing all things we want to leverage the power of everyone to really make this the best game that we possibly can so unreal tournament.com for more information on that of course gamersnexus.net for the full article and we will see you all next time you\n"