Focusing on the intricacies of level design in the gaming industry, this book offers insights from a seasoned expert with over twenty years of experience. It addresses both the technical production skills required and the essential social and soft skills necessary for success in this dynamic field. Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted role of a level designer, making it a valuable resource for aspiring professionals.
This thesis proposes a kinematic reduction for Kirchhoff-Love shells in the special case of developable base surfaces that deform isometrically. These specifications apply (approximately) whenever large deformations with small material strains occur, as for example during paper bending or the installation of flexible flat cables in consumer electronics. The model resulting from this reduction considers a curve and a director field along it, reducing the shell to items with one-dimensional parameter domain and thereby decreasing the number of degrees of freedom involved. A thorough study of the differential geometry of this model culminates in a set of geometric constraints on the base curve and the director vector field which are proven to be equivalent to isometric surface deformation. Thus, the equilibrium state of a developable reference ribbon under given boundary conditions is the minimiser of the elastic shell energy with respect to the constraints. Different optimisation methods are compared to each other, and the numerical behaviour of the approach is studied. Eventually, several examples illustrate the applicability of the model – among them, the famous Möbius strip.
