Salvete, Anno community!

My name is Björn Frechenhäuser and I am a Senior Level Artist working on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I have been at Ubisoft Mainz for 12 years and after Anno 2205 and Anno 1800, this is the third Anno game I have the pleasure of working on. If you’d like to see some of my work on previous installments, you can check out my Artstation profile.

Level Art can mean a lot of different things, very dependent on which company, which studio and which project you work for. It can be more centric around the creation of 3D assets and textures or the visual development and dressing of levels or storytelling in the world and its locations. So, what does it mean for Anno? In short: all of the above (and more). But either way, at the heart of Level Art is always – you guessed it – the level. For Anno the level consists of the game world and its islands, which serve as canvas for players to build their cities on.

In today’s DevBlog I want to give you an insight into how islands are being created, what our processes are and how we tried to achieve the next step after an extremely successful Anno 1800.

From Anno 1800 to Anno 117 – what has changed in island creation?

At the beginning of every new Anno game, we ask ourselves: What do we want to achieve? What do we want to improve? What do we want to drop? For us in Level Art, the mission was clear right from the start: We wanted to create the best looking, most natural, most diverse, most immersive game world in the series. Sounds easy enough, right?

Of course, going forward meant more of an evolution than a revolution because the levels are still bound by the game’s rules, the balancing of its features and the performance of our target platforms – as they have always been. During the postlaunch of Anno 1800 we started researching in different directions and in this blog, you will see some of the breakthroughs we achieved.

Procedural Texturing

In the past we had already established a procedural content creation pipeline for some aspects of our island creation process, namely the generation of the island’s terrain – you can read up on it in this older DevBlog for Anno 1800. However, the texturing process of the islands (which involves adding materials such as grass, rock, sand, etc. to your terrain) was mostly a manual, elaborate but somewhat repetitive procedure back then. Furthermore, the resolution at which our textures could be added to our islands, the so-called “texture splatting resolution”, was too low. So, with the help of our Graphics Programming department we quadrupled our texture splatting resolution for the ability to splat textures with much more control and way more detail.

Now we use the so-called “splat maps” generated together with our terrain that use algorithms that simulate aspects of nature such as erosion, thermal weathering, deposition, terrain wear and many more.

Texture Displacement

The procedural texturing already added a layer of diversity and natural look that we couldn’t achieve before, but we wanted to go further to improve how the textures themselves shape our visuals. We implemented a technique called “displacement mapping” that allows textures to not only sit on top of the terrain but change the shape of the terrain and increase its visual quality without the use of actual 3D assets.

Terrain Steepness

Another lever we wanted to pull to make our islands look more natural and realistic was playing around with the steepness of the terrain and consequently the slope on which our buildings could be built. Anno 1800 had a maximum terrain angle of 12%, which presented us a significant limit for island design.

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we aimed to increase this angle. Researching this topic was a significant collaborative effort involving multiple departments, including not only Level art, but also Art Direction, Game Direction, Graphics Programming, Game Design, 3D Art, and Gameplay Programming. This extensive teamwork was necessary because the topic is closely related to nearly every aspect of our building system. After a lot of back and forth and countless hours of testing we decided to go for it and doubled our maximum buildable terrain slope to 24%.

With these new improvements on our toolbelt – among many others – it was time to start our journey of designing and creating the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana. Below I will show you a simplified breakdown of how an island is being created from the first to the last step. 

Island creation in Anno 117 – from simple ideas to in-game islands

Setting a course

Before creating even just a single pixel of an island, we ask ourselves some questions: What should our world look like? What expectations do we want to fulfil? What stories do we want to tell? During this phase, we gather hundreds of reference pictures and explore many different ideas together with Concept Art to nail down what look and feel we want to achieve. This is when, together with Art Direction, Game Direction and Game Design we developed our two provinces Latium and Albion. We designed their look, established their uniqueness and set the ground to develop a visual direction that would serve as a guide for our creation process.

Island Conceptualisation

The first step to creating an island is always thinking about shapes, volumes and topology. Additionally, we need to establish a set of rules with Game Design: rough island size, available construction space, required beach areas, mining lode amount, etc. Once this is done and we have all the ingredients, we can start creating the first island concepts.

Unlike Anno 1800, we start our island concepts directly in 3D, using a tool called “World Machine” which has already been in use since Anno 2205. By doing this we can already get a much better feeling for an island, and this lays the groundwork for later iterations. Thanks to the procedural pipeline we set up, we can create dozens of island concepts relatively quickly. Once a batch of concepts is produced, we sit together with Game Design and Art Direction to decide which islands are fitting to be approved for further production.

Blockout

Once an island concept is approved, we create a first playable blockout version of it to further iterate its topology and the balancing of construction areas, beach locations, mining lode amounts etc. Moreover, we do a first texturing pass to check the look and feel. Besides World Machine, during this phase we work quite a bit with our proprietary tool called “Anno Editor”, to implement the gameplay features mentioned above. Still, we stay as open and flexible as possible because we might need to make a lot of changes to the island along the way.

Visual Design

After numerous iterations of the blockout version we eventually reach a state where all gameplay and balancing aspects of the island are set and approved. Now we start working on the visual aspects of the island. A lot of the visual detail already came from our procedural workflow as described and additionally we scatter vegetation assets using a tool called “Houdini”.

Once all the procedural steps are done, our base island is ready: it’s now time to start working manually on the details and flesh out the visuals of the island by adjusting textures, placing rocks and vegetation assets, adding decals, giving more character to the topology, implementing particle effects, adding waterbodies, and so on. 

Polishing

The final step of our island creation process is a polishing pass. On the one hand, it encompasses visual polishing according to feedback we receive, adding more unique details such as environmental storytelling or adding points of interest, and on the other hand it encompasses gameplay polishing to make sure all the features work as expected (e.g. buildable beaches, mining lode, forest locations, etc.), implementing audio with our Audio team and making sure that there are no bugs occurring.

We cannot wait to see your awesome cities built on our islands, read about what your favourite (or least favourite) islands are and which of the details we so carefully crafted you discover along the way!