We already have Art Style which was created to explain how to work in our particular technology. For anyone doing world-building, the above should be read first, before reading this document, to be familiar with the scale and format of the art used.

Scale

Making things out of voxels is very different from polygons. Polygons can be any size, from the smallest detail to miles high. Our voxels have exactly 1 size (about 4 cm) and our blocks are always 9x9x9 (36 cm / 14 inch). So we can't make small detail, and making something a mile high requires enormous amounts of material.

So scale on the small end is easy: we simply can't do it. It thus suffices to discuss scale on the other end: how big should things be? Can we make a mountain a mile high out of voxels?

There are 3 considerations:

1. Technical:

Yes, our tech allows the creation of fairly large worlds, but having a "mile high mountain" is not going to be as efficient as some of the more recent polygon engines that can have game worlds of 10x10 miles easily, and fill them with LOD-ed vegetation randomly. Our expectations of scale should be scaled down a bit from these mega open world games, while we still can be a lot bigger and more open world than classical "levels". For comparison, our world sizes translate to:

• size "9": this is the smallest size you can realistically build an "open world" game experience in, 512 blocks in 1 dimension, resulting in 184 meters.
• size "10": a medium size, 1024 blocks, 368 meters.
• size "11": large, 2048 blocks, 736 meters.
• size "12": huge, 4096 blocks, 1472 meters, or almost a mile. Even though it feels like a huge world, it's not actually that big compared to some modern games.

2. Aesthetic:

Voxels also don't scale so well aesthetically, they really are the prettiest when staying close to certain sizes and certain detail levels. If you tried to make something really huge out of voxels, it be challenging to find the right kinds of detail to keep making it look interesting. Something really big would likely not look so good.

To some extent, voxels benefit from uniformity, meaning you want to make small things bigger and big things smaller.

3. Gameplay:

We've seen a development in games to larger and larger game worlds, because a) it's cheap nowadays, and b) it sounds impressive, makes for good marketing, and gives gamers a sense of getting "a massive world to explore".

But we all know the reality of it: large amounts of barren landscape between quests that doesn't contribute to gameplay, and the need for vehicles or teleportation to get around. Walking around in the game world feels like a chore unless part of an organized quest.

While I don't want to back to the days where games had only cramped indoor levels, and we're generally making an "open world" game, it makes a lot more sense to have a slightly less crazy scale, and focus more worlds that are carefully crafted beginning to end, and a packed with gameplay thru out.

Also, some of these modern games ship the entire game in a single world (50hrs of gameplay), we want to aim for worlds where the average playtime is maybe 2-3 hrs (that's just an average, worlds that play in half an hour or take 20 hrs should also be possible). So that also naturally leads to smaller worlds.

A better scale has advantages that you can walk to every location, you can see future locations (but can't go there yet because you'd get killed!), etc. Walking across the map also gives you a better sense of place that the usual "teleport to the next icon" gameplay.

A size 9 world (small):

A size 10 world (medium):

Tried to take a screenshot of a size 11 world, but it looked largely the same as the size 10 since all the new terrain is outside of the fog. It feels positively huge to fly around, even though it objectively isn't.. but it will feel big if it contained all crafted gameplay experiences.

One of the most impressive games I've ever played in terms of packing a lot of hand-crafted detail and gameplay in what still feels like an open world game are the Gothic and Risen series. Here's a hand-drawn map (couldn't find a more realistic map) of what is probably a 500x500 meter area of land, densely packed with hand crafted areas with all unique NPCs and monster encounters that you play for 20+ hrs:

And here's the largest village in the game, which only contains some 15 small houses and 57 unique NPCs, almost all involved in some quest:

Map from the oldest game in the series, Gothic 1 (similar size world):

Another game, Oceanhorn, that achieved extremely dense open world gameplay areas. This is not practical for us to follow as an example, since it has a very different gameplay style, but it is a fun example for contrast:

Compared with say Skyrim where you can go for a very long time not encountering anything:

Here's a nice video showing maps getting ever bigger.. but not necessarily better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwXV0oLEfCM (And again, this is for whole-game-in-one-world-games, we want to have many worlds).