At this years Game Developers Conference (short GDC), CD Project RED gave us some insights in developing Cyberpunk 2077.
In two about one hour long talk named "'Cyberpunk 2077': Bringing Light to Night City" and "Art Direction Summit: Building Night City" the developers explained a bit the challenges they faced during the development.
Lets go through some interesting facts
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The talks were lead by:
- Jakub Knapik (Art Director)
- Dave Yablonsky (Lead Lighting Artist)
- Poo Voon Kent (Senior Lighting Artist)
- Kacper Niepokolczycki (Lead Environment Artist)
Building Night City
At the beginning of the development of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red had to figure out a few basic things. Because the team was used to the third-person view of The Witcher 3 from previous years, they had a lot to learn for the new game's first-person view.
How wide must and can the doors be so that the main character V can fit through and the scene still looks natural? What is the right length for a staircase, how much space do the animations take up, what about the cover systems?
The team worked early and intensively on working out these metrics, as lead environment artist Kacper Niepokolczycki explained.
There was another problem in the early phase: the new version of the Red Engine was far from finished, which is why Niepokolczycki and his team built the first drafts of Night City based on The Witcher 3 runtime environment.
Later the new technology was used. At times, CD Projekt Red considered procedurally generating all or part of Night City. After a few experiments, however, the team decided against it, said Niepokolczycki - so the world of Cyberpunk 2077 is built entirely by hand.
Night City
A separate team was responsible for each district. Niepokolczycki took care of Kabuki because of his soft spot for Asia - and in doing so drew on elements from Hong Kong and other real metropolises, for example in terms of the street layout or the connections between buildings.
Early on, it was important to the developers that each district has its own style. There were also a few less noticeable differences, such as a slightly different color palette. Japan Town, for example, is light red and Arasaka Waterfront is more orange.
Also important: The players should be able to orient themselves to some extent without constantly looking at the map. A few well-visible buildings in the city center help with this. According to Niepokolczycki, in Kabuki the roads generally lead downwards to the south.
Night City ... during the day
The developers built the actual city from modules. To do this, CD Projekt Red created many walls, partitions, balconies, fences and similar for each district, which were assembled like prefabricated houses.
The team then applied the so-called decals - graphics such as graffiti or posters. Here, too, care was taken to equip the districts differently - in addition, graffiti from gangs on many streets at the crossing points indicate a new territory.
Let there be light
The game uses Physically Based Rendering, in addition to global illumination, environmental lighting is also used in an unusually large number of places.
Among other things, this has to do with the nested structure of Night City: in tunnels and underpasses, the global illumination apparently has a small tendency to graphic errors, which had to be compensated for.
There were problems with the twilight. A trick to solve these difficulties a bit is to cheat with the clock: the sun's highest point and night have been lengthened disproportionately, while twilight is much shorter than it needs to be.