The best kind of door in a video game is the one no one remembers. Door are often synonymous with a massive design headache.

Death trash creator Stephan hovelbrinks explained that doors’have all sorts of possible bugs’. The last of us part II co-game director Kurt Margenau called it’the thing that took the longest to get right’.

Crystal dynamics game director will kerslake explained that doors can open toward or away from you; handles can be on either side. In a first-person game, you can animate the door and not the player, and this is easier in a high-fidelity third-person game there is an expectation that the player’s hand will move to the handle.

If a door hits an NPC, does the door stop, or does the NPC move?.’the choices here can cause all kinds of bugs depending on your game,’ says kerslake.

The next step up in complexity is doors used only as progress Gates, they open only and then ca n’t be closed again. For some developers, it’s just not worth the trouble.

The level of accuracy needed for a player to believe the door is a door is higher for a common object than a fantasy one, says Galbraith.

Our ideas of how we interact with them are incredibly clear. For doors like the ones in our homes, we subconsciously learn the minute details of how they act. So when we see a door in a game that closes too fast or without friction we’ll notice that something is n’t quite right about it.

Game doors often swing either way.’it’s just a weird coincidence that the brain subconsciously chooses to ignore,’ says Galbraith.

Doors are n’t just an aesthetic or immersion technique in video games. They’re gates that keep players from moving on until they’ve finished a puzzle or beaten a boss. They can act as markers for the player’s progress, build tension, or act as cover.