Creating a multi-layered game world in Tenet of the Spark

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as developing a rating system and making juicy TV in The Crush House, the development of custom tools for the 2D photo mode of A Highland Song, and refreshing the Crusader Kings III tutorial mode through optimized UX.

In this edition, ROAR Games co-founder Artem Shcherbakov tells us about the extensive technical negotiations behind the creation of their three-layer overlapping worlds.

Hi, I’m Artem Shcherbakov, co-founder of ROAR Games. Crafting a narrative that blends multiple timelines within a cohesive gameplay experience was one of our most ambitious challenges in Tenet of the Spark. In many scenes, players can switch between three distinct world-states. The primary modern-day world that anchors the narrative, and two past versions of the world that intertwine with it mechanically and narratively. This was obviously a very complicated and sophisticated problem to tackle design-wise. Today, I’d like to share our experience in overcoming the challenge of creating three distinct, overlapping game worlds within one cohesive narrative for Tenet of the Spark.

Developing these worlds—with modern urban, Viking, and Aztec themes, respectively—was one of the most complex challenges our team faced. Our goal was to ensure that each world felt rich and immersive on its own yet still connected within the overarching story, all while allowing a seamless transition between these three environments without upending the game’s balance. Here’s how we approached this ambitious task.

Image via ROAR Games.

Building narrative connection

Above all else, we’ve always envisioned Tenet of the Spark as a narrative experience, with the action and interaction conveying players from one emotional beat to the next. Maintaining clarity in delivering these emotional beats was a key part of the design. If we over-complicated the layered-world mechanic, it could render the story hard to follow, or run the risk of players missing out on important moments and twists. So we established some core design priorities.

To maintain narrative cohesion, we decided early to make the modern-day story of our protagonist the cornerstone and have the other elements built around it. The Viking and Aztec worlds would serve to move the main story thread forward and broaden the gameplay possibility space without becoming a focus. That said, this is also an action game, and we also believe the game should still feel satisfying even if a player chooses to skip all of those cutscenes we worked so hard on (please don’t), so the additional world layers are in part there to keep moment-to-moment action constantly engaging.

Balancing gameplay mechanics

Image via ROAR Games.

The core concept of having three playable, overlapping worlds went through several major iterations. We initially envisioned giving the player total freedom to switch worlds at any moment, but not only would that have been enormously demanding in terms of art assets required, but it also diluted the focus on the main character’s story. Playtesters found themselves skipping large chunks of content or getting frustrated as they couldn’t figure out the world state required to continue. Other developers considered us masochists for effectively trying to make three games in a trench coat.

We also tried a time-limit system, where switching between states was a limited resource. Not only did this not help on the workload front, but it broke the game’s flow further and brought us further away from the experience we envisioned.

In the end, we settled on a somewhat more restrictive but narratively and mechanically resonant solution. Switching would only be possible in combat and during contextually appropriate situations where using these abilities made narrative sense from the protagonist’s perspective. In these zones, switching can happen freely at the player’s demand, but the very fact that switching is possible becomes a hint that it’s required (or at the very least advantageous) to progress. We also use flashback cutscenes to forcibly switch between layers to ensure narrative cohesion.

Image via ROAR Games.

Given the different worlds, it was crucial for us to not only show the gameplay differences of each character—in terms of strength, combat styles, and enemies—but also to give each world its own unique interactivity. This interactivity reveals the protagonist’s perception and ties the worlds together through a combinatorial experience. We aim to create gameplay that offers not just basic stances, ability sets, and skill trees for each character but also encourages players to view worlds as tools for solving challenges in arenas and other encounters.

Image via ROAR Games.

Distinct visual design

While a massive undertaking, creating a world that can be viewed through three distinct lenses was a thrilling challenge for our art team. From the beginning of development, we set out to make the visuals as far from generic as we could. Each of the three worlds has its own visual language—detailed and chaotic in the modern era, shadowy, stark, and mysterious in the Aztec era, and harsh, natural beauty in the Viking realm.

We decided early on that historical accuracy could take a backseat to narrative resonance. Gritty realism is secondary to how the protagonist perceives these other worlds. This allowed us to break free from reality’s confines and really highlight when we found most impactful in each era, and showcase the aesthetics and concepts that we were most excited by.

Also, getting away from strict accuracy helped keep the gameplay design focused. Slightly more fantastical aesthetics proved very functional in terms of combat design. Enemy archetypes need to be readable across worlds while maintaining continuity, and interactive objects need to stand out in order to nudge the player into switching between worlds for an edge in combat. Each of the worlds needed to be visually distinct, have a shared design language in order to make switching seamless and offer mechanical advantages to the player. That’s a lot!

We’re all about details, fighting hard for them. Posters, graffiti, hidden clues—every little element in each world adds depth and reveals more layers for those who pay attention. We settled early on a heavily stylized aesthetic inspired by the Spider-Verse films, with actively unrealistic models and textures. Having a shared, stark aesthetic also helped unify the styles between worlds, and by narrowing down the world-switching mechanic to key zones, we’ve given ourselves room to focus on areas where anything is possible—in the most crucial moments for protagonist and player alike.

Level streaming technology as the foundation for seamless switching

Image via ROAR Games.

Needless to say, even limiting it to key areas of the game, having three worlds that can be switched between without interrupting game flow or system performance was a major technical endeavor. Each level is structured like a layered cake, consisting of multiple entities: geometry, global lighting, local lighting, and background elements. There are also shared levels for all three worlds—narrative, sound, gameplay, and blocking volumes that define common collision boundaries across worlds.

During prototyping, we build the framework, breaking down the space into independent sections such as arenas, traversal zones, and exploration areas. This allows us to prioritize zones where seamless switching is possible. A well-designed location allows resources to be shuffled efficiently, ensuring optimal streaming at any given moment, preloading sub-levels during cutscenes and bottlenecks to avoid stutters or loading pauses during transitions.

Levels are compartmentalized and culled efficiently. Inactive or inaccessible areas are unloaded, freeing up resources to load upcoming content into RAM, enabling seamless world-switching. Loading the geometry of the new world takes priority, while unloading the old one happens last, allowing us to process visual transition effects smoothly. This system also benefits parallel workflows between departments—lighting, geometry, or interactivity—enabling simultaneous work without interference.

Loading the geometry of the new world takes priority, while the old world’s geometry is unloaded at the last moment, with a snapshot of the level saved in a RenderTarget. This gives us more flexibility and time to refine the visual transition effects between worlds. One of the key benefits of this system is the efficient parallelization of work across departments—whether it’s lighting, geometry, or arena/level interactivity. The development process for a level runs simultaneously across all teams without causing performance bottlenecks.

Working with object collisions

Image via ROAR Games.

The visual process of switching between three environments is a major challenge for artists, environment designers, writers and more, all while keeping within performance overhead tolerances. But making it consistently interactive through it all is a whole different set of problems. When you’ve got three separate worlds filled with their own objects and geometry, maintaining seamless gameplay between these spaces becomes a challenge.

Image via ROAR Games.

What happens if the player gets stuck between objects that don’t exist in other worlds after switching? Or if an object is too large, pushing the player and disrupting combat flow? To prevent this, we avoid generating collisions for individual meshes. Instead, we group all objects and arena boundaries into a single collision area. This shared collision zone spans all three worlds, ensuring seamless gameplay while allowing creative freedom with environmental art. Effectively, creating a single contiguous gameplay space where each object within can exist in multiple states.

Image via ROAR Games.

Inspiration

Video games are an iterative medium, and nothing is created without knowledge of prior art. We stand on the shoulders of giants, drawing inspiration from the classic time-shifting level “Effect and Cause” in Titanfall 2 and the similarly themed level “A Crack In The Slab” from Dishonored 2. Our inspirations extend beyond games as well, with the parallel storytelling in Cloud Atlas and the seamless transition between worlds in Tomorrowland being huge inspirations. Each of these has its own approach to the concept and were incredible technical and narrative feats of their time. We’ve still got plenty to discover and learn, but we hope that we’ll be able to carve out our own memorable piece of gaming history with Tenet of the Spark.

Thank you to the marvelous team at ROAR Games who helped me write this article. Check out our social networks to learn more: Twitter, Steam, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, official website, and Discord.