Northern Iron - Settling on scale

An often overlooked part of level design by beginners is scale. However all objects in the space need to be sized appropriately for their purpose and use, otherwise they look off and breaks immersion for the player.

For our game there are two considerations we have to take when deciding on scale, the size in comparison to a human and the size in comparison to a mech. With the prominence of mechs in the world, pathways, roads and entryways will often need to be large enough to all these machines access to where they are needed.

We also needed to consider the size of the mechs themselves in regards to their operators. Indeed, we agreed that the mechs would be fairly small as far as other mechs in the genre go, but there is still a limit to how small that they would be. We agreed that the mechs need to be the size of a light tank at the smallest, and tall enough to fit a human operator inside.

The end result was that a human operator would be less than half the size of a mech, allowing them to fit inside the cockpit with the engine and other mechanisms and systems, while the mech was still small enough to easily traverse and fight in an urban environment.

In terms of the game engine, we decided to work to a 1:1 scale, with a single unit in engine roughly equating to a meter, so a human is 2 units tall, while a small mech, including the WoSD is roughly 4 units tall.