Applying 3D Level Design Skills to the 2D World of Hyper Light Drifter

[Music] thank you for coming do all the things turn off cell phones remember valuations and let's get started so this is applying a 3d level design skills to the 2d world of hyper light drifter my name is Lisa Brown I'm an independent game designer at the moment but for the purposes of this talk my relevant history was as a designer for insomniac games and more recently my work with heart-machine on the game hyper light drifter the day I'm going to talk about the transition I made from working on large triple-a 3d action shooters such as resistance 3 and sunset overdrive to hyper light drifter which is a 2d overhead action game and what level design processes and principles carried over between 3d and 2d quick some few caveats for this talk the focus of this talk is going to be on action combat games so everything I talk about will be through that lens also I'm going to be showing several full-sized maps from hyper light drifter which of course will reveal secret areas so if you care

about that thing be advised and I also want to call out then all of the example levels I give on all games I show there's a fair amount of collaboration involved in the level work so many of these works many of these rooms show things that were touched by multiple designers multiple members of the team not just me especially in the later polish phases so what's that let's get started so this was the spring of 2015 I just left insomniac to go indie work on some my own projects and around that time the heart-machine team approached me they were working on the indie action RPG hyper light drifter and needed additional help with level design so they came to me and they asked if I would be interested and so I thought to myself okay all my level design knowledge and skills for action games thus far has been on big 3d games I've done zero level design for 2d games and I have no idea if any of my experience will apply at all so I said you know yes of course I would love to do level design for you so they gave me that a design test and I ran into a few struggles off the bat the screenshot

show these sort of 2d overhead but also from the side perspective of hyper light and I started struggling with this when I was doing their test in fact I was so in experienced in making 2d maps that I ended up mocking up structures and Sketchup and like tilting the camera to help me figure out what that might look in this partial overhead view world and you know it worked out okay and once I got the hang of things I was more able to easily able to lay things out for the test and ended up with a map that I thought was pretty okay and the team liked what I did so they brought me aboard however I was still worried a lot about how a lot of my level design staples wouldn't translate from 3d these were the sorts of design habits that by now are second nature to me and I knew they wouldn't be applying in the same way one fear of course was that I was very used to dealing with an outward facing camera and to thinking about things in z space especially with things like you know using distant landmarks to help play or navigate through a large space which of course landmarks don't

work like that in an overhead game so that wouldn't apply also all of my experience setting up combat spaces was from this perspective of a forward-facing cone so everything I knew about establishing front lines or mitigating player awareness about what they couldn't see wasn't necessarily going to be useful in this case and I also tended to rely a lot on verticality and spaces in 3d to make things interesting but this was limited in the engine for hyper light there was no way to make it possible to walk both under and over the same space so a lot of the sneaky sort of wraparound things I'd done in my design test wouldn't even be possible because of the engine constraints so those were my big fears going in but after I got started building some levels for the game I realized there was still a lot of transferable skill going on from 3d to 2d and ultimately I ended up finding many many parallels but for the sake of this talk I picked three big ones that I'm going to talk about so the first thing that carried over was my personal initial construction process and what I mean by that is what I do when I start

work on a brand new level from scratch with nothing but an empty scene before me I'm mainly going to talk about my process of using established metrics as constraints for the very first parts of building a new level so many designers I know when they're working on a new level they sort of approach it like you would a subtractive sculpture you know they blocked out big general shapes first and then go back over and shape those big blocks down in a more D spaces and I know a lot of level designers who work this way but for whatever reason I don't tend to use that approach beyond a very rough suggestion of what a layout might look at and said my process is when starting a new level from scratch I'll start laying out objects according to established distances that we've already figured out for the game and then growing the level outwards from those attached pieces so then those then shapes end up driving the bigger more general shape of the whole level and by metrics I mean things like you know what's the minimum width of a corridor for an enemy to be able to

navigate through it or what is the jump height and what is the jump distance and and things like that that's what I'm talking about when I say metrics so here's an example from sunset overdrive if you haven't played it sunset overdrive is a very fast-paced open-world 3d shooter with a focus on traversal so things like rail grinding while running bouncing on things etc and this example is from a moment very early on in production where we had just decided that we were going to integrate combat with the players move set before they were very separate and it the combat was much more like a traditional 3d shooter but we decided we were going to combine them and all the designers were tasked with prototyping some spaces to figure out you know what that would feel like and what impact it would have on level design so I ended up making this sort of foodcourt prototype it's it's very rough and focused on the mechanics and when I had sort of a rough idea I want to do something you know with multiple Heights that sort of spirals around some central feature and

specifically I was trying to make a space that would work in multiplayer so let me walk you through my metrics s constraints process that with what that looks like when I was building this so I would start out with say traversal piece this bouncy awning the player can bounce on and I'm like okay if the player bounced off of this what's the range like where they could land and somewhere in this ring so I'm gonna put another bouncy object there and I want a few options for the player so I play you know pace a couple of them but I need to make sure they're at the right width so enemies can run through them so now I have a couple more okay you know what's what's the next range of where the area of the player can land I want to put more stuff there but I don't want things to be too flat so let's let's elevate a little bit what's the what's the standard Harris stair height okay we'll put those in you know make sure there's more traversal options right in that area and then again I want to link this up with something else and

here's the range and here's the width it has to be for enemies to navigate and so on and so forth so it ended up sort of just like branching out paths from one traversal element to another and as I mentioned in this way this construction method is a bit like a branching tree traversal and how small additions of connected spaces end up shaping the whole general space rather than the inverse method of starting with big general blocks and carving them down so this metrics driven process for me ended up coming to play on hyper light immediately with the first room the team had me build so for context they've been building out the East region which is the water region in the game they wanted something to contrast a lot of the tight linear underground combat spaces they were making so they said make a huge room that has multiple paths you can take through it and that features this particular new enemy so I'm going to talk about this room called mega huge lab which you can see in its final form here and for reference of how a mega

huge this room is here's this rectangle here is the player's viewport so this is how much they can see on screen at once so it's quite big compared to a lot of rooms in the game but before it made it to that state it had humble beginnings here actually it technically it had even more humble beginnings as a really super rough sketch to have a relative idea of some different connected spaces I want to do but we're gonna start here because this is where that carry over from my insomniac process started to come in when I was faced with a blank room and had a vague idea of sort of what I wanted for the space I found myself falling back on the same process that I did with that sunset overdrive prototype which was start laying things out at distances that were already defined by existing metrics in the game and see how they connected so in this case the main metrics in question were the Drifters - distance like how far like maximum you could get across a gap there were some fixed stared dimensions that had hard already been established that I use for distinguishing like vertical airs and then of course the

just the viewport size for the player that ended up being the most useful constraint when building so similar to the sunset prototype I started out by laying out blocks of the viewport size to get an idea of how much would be on screen in each chunk and it just sort of you know connected out as I was building it apart and when laying out a section like this which you knows it's very early and went through many iterations later but just to get something started to iterate on you know I would start with the drifter over here and measure what's his max - distance here and here and just branch out so if you're curious this is what the evolution of that room looked like over time it went through a number of iterations driven by some enemy changes they feature enemy changed a couple of hazard changes but ultimately that rough initial connected structure you know still retained even in the final version all right so even though that's a sort of specific thing to my personal work style the basic steps and principles of

how do I just initially get started constructing carried over quite well even though there were a lot of differences between 2d and 3d so the second thing that carried over was this idea of using player defense and survival instincts to shape how I approach making level when I was at insomniac I worked under a designer drew Murray and I remember him once saying this quote to me defensive capability of the player in shooters is more important to level design than offensive power which is very interesting I had not considered that when I was you know a young fledgling designer so in other words how a player survives and how they feel about survival has a really big influence on how you build a level even sometimes even more so than like enemy or weapon design and this is things like does your game have a health regen system do you have an explicit cover system basically when the player is about to die what mechanically do you expect them to do and it has a huge effect on how you shape the space so

since that overdrive was kind of we because in this game the the more you were moving the safer you were you survived by traversing and going as fast as possible through all these chain travel and as a result the level design doesn't have a lot of those traditional places of safety that the player might hide in that you might see in a more traditional third-person shooter but resistance 3 and hyper light drifter have more similar defensive models so there's no regenerating health and the things you have to do to replenish health tend to be pretty risky be that run out and grab a pickup in a dangerous situation or using those stocked health syringes in hyper light and thematically the world in both you know is meant to feel dangerous as a whole so there were some elements of the level design that were similar as a result of that so as a brief aside a lot of the terminology and purling from the section is from the book an architectural approach to level designed by Christopher Totten who I believe is in the room somewhere there he is right there in middle this book does a great job of generalizing a lot of level design principles it's that so

they apply across many genres and there was a section in the book called emotional level design through survival instinct and as I was reading it I realized it was giving terminology to things that I'd been doing many years just from intuition or experience so it was great to you know have those terms one of these things is this idea of prospect and refuge space so the quickly paraphrase this boils down to you know prospect space is being vulnerable out in the open versus feeling safe and hidey-hole and that's just the general gist of it and in a lot of situations in action games you'll see these patterns where you'll have someone in a safe space have to go out in danger to get to a secondary refuge space further out and I really like this generalization because it's a principle that kind of pride apply broadly regardless of you know the camera whether it's 3d or 2d it's just something a way of giving terminology to a sort of natural habit of mine and level design so like in resistance 3 contrasting spaces of danger and safety were a frequent

pattern so you would often seek cover in these edge spaces that were you know concealed and often next to very open tall ceiling spaces and this was a very common way of you know refuge versus prospect space this is a safe space and this is where the danger is and one thing I want to point out is the player feeling really comes across in the relation of these spaces to each other so if you are crawling through vent with a very low ceiling and not a lot of maneuverability this in and of itself does not necessarily convey safety especially because you know if there were combat in this space it would be very dangerous but if you're in that same vent that is adjacent to an open combat space and you have the high ground it feels very safe the enemies aren't aware of you it gives you a good vantage point of how to approach the combat and it's just a very safe feeling compared to that's where the danger is here is where the safety is and then of course once the combat starts it's no longer safe to stay up there and player gets driven out into the prospect space so

when making spaces for hyper light I found I was relying on the same principle of appealing to that survival instinct when creating combat spaces even if the methods were quite different between 3d and 2d for example I didn't have ceiling height as a tool to differentiate prospect and refuge space but I also found that it was more simple to create a feeling of the player being safely enclosed so here's an example there's a little refuge space after a hall of these crushed rocks that you have to dodge and it's just a little moment of safety before you have to go back out and deal with this turret to up in the corner there and it's really only conveyed by how it's blocked in and how you have to go down and around to move out rather than going straight through it just makes it feel you know more closed and safe and as I mentioned earlier I did find that in this 2d overhead view it was a lot simpler to make the feeler player feel and closed and safe with relatively minimal construction compared to 3d and I think that's because you don't have to worry about conveying safe space that's

outside the field of vision like you do in a 3d game and that sort of thing often requires some exaggeration to you know point out like the surrounding space that you can't see and you didn't have that problem to solve in an overhead view also I want to make it really clear that this and this isn't just about cover so here's that same area but on the right I've removed the pillars that reach into the frame and the little block on the bottom and even though there both have the same technical safety because of the range from the big bad bird up there they feel a little different the more open one feels slightly more connected to the combat space and more dangerous as a result so you don't have to do much in this view to just make the player feel enclosed so even though the technical implementation was different between 2d and 3d this idea of building prospect and refuge spaces to sort of hone in on that survival instinct still came into play in both contexts last thing that I think carried over quite well is how I use the

space to control combat pacing and by this I mean a lot of the level design strategies that I used in the 3d games to pace out individual combat moments were still applicable in this 2d game one of the big ways you can do that is finding ways to isolate combat moments so this is a pacing chart from resistance 3 and in this case isolating meant you know physically distancing when combats happen throughout a level to achieve like a level wide sense of pacing it can also mean just like physically enclosing a combat area from surrounding areas it can also mean isolating in terms of time so things like controlling waves moaning in the middle of a fight just to get a particular pacing for the individual encounter one thing I want to mention is you can isolate combat space without that meaning like walling in an enclosed combat arena and a linear sequence sunset overdrive took place in an open world it's a big city it's fairly dense but the combat spaces were

still built as distinct isolated spaces you could access them from multiple places but they were still constructed in a way that separated them from the surrounding area and like really sold it as this is a self-contained space that sort of focuses in word on how the combat plays out in that space and you know there's a there's a couple of these throughout the game but you can sort of spot them when you go through they just feel you know a little more encapsulated from the immediate space so you know you know very distinctly when you are no longer in the combat space in hyper light drifter one way we isolated combat was through the use of camera locks for example here's a space in the you enter from the top and the main fight carries you through that combat space on the right there's a secret over there on the left but we use camera locks you can see this in the Red Square space there and so locks the camera there and part of that is to keep you know them from seeing the secret over on the left but it also focuses the player on the combat and really makes that feel

like an isolated moment it ends up looking like this where the camera is locked horizontally and it's just sort of like you know encapsulate this is its own distinct combat moment and we did this sort of camera work all over the game it ended up being a really really important tool to pacing throughout the entire game another way I often use space to control combat pacing in my 3d games refers back to that previous section which is this idea of denying refuge space in order to ratchet up tempo tension for that particular moment so I often did this by introducing enemy access to a space that was normally a safe cover space in hyper light only thing we did was have these sort of trap arenas so you would enter into a space and you would get blocked in by blocks he would have that meant you had to fight with no access to any refuge space and it ended up being a really good tool for adding tense punctuation moments to combat without like needing to very enemy composition or anything like that too much it was a really quick tool for

like getting that intense moment another example there's this one room where you have to go out on a raised platform there's no walls there's no cover you fight flying enemies in the ground like shifts underneath you and this lack of access to any refuge space at all helped really sell this area is sort of a final challenge after a series of connected rooms so it's great for like punctuation marks like that and again like the previous one even though implementation was different in both cases the principles behind my use of space to controlling combat spacing was really something that came naturally in a play in both contexts so briefly I want to mention again that there were actually many more things that carried over nicely from my 2d 3d experience to the 2d level design and I want to call out this book again from once again giving terminologies to things that I had been doing as a designer for and years based on intuition one of its strengths is how its able to generalize level design principles and show how

they can apply in many different genres and viewports so there will be bonus slides after GDC for all the things I had to cut all right wrap to wrap up I'm gonna go through a walkthrough example of a hyper light drifter room from start to finish and talk about how each of these principles and processes carried over and came into play when we were building this room this is the room I'll talk about it's a room in the north region of the game where you're fighting coldest birds and it's one of a series of linked to underground combat rooms in the north here's a quick time-lapse of how this room developed over time just to note that my examples won't necessarily be in chronological order but just how you get a feel for how its shaped over many iterations and here are the goals I was given when tasked with building this and similar rooms in the north we were trying to figure out when we were trying to figure out what environments the North enemies worked best in an experiment with air we were

experimenting with different combinations of North enemies so in this case I was mostly focusing on these short rains powerful combat cultist Birds but also brought into play this little rifle Dirk here he's a relatively weak but long-range enemy and I wanted to play a little bit with that and then for these rooms I was also supposed to keep them fairly tight and focused more or less on one idea at a time so no mega-huge labs here so this was sort of the process after coming up with a really rough idea of what I wanted to try I started with those metrics similar as I had in the other level from earlier I blocked out two screens worth of space for the two main beats of the room tried to keep it small and tight and this was nice it because it naturally made a little corner space over here there was a good place to stash a secret then at the room entrance I started out by laying out several platforms at the maximum - distance from each other to see you know what I would need to sell as these are these are like precarious

cliffs on the edge there and that sort of showed me okay that takes up most of that first square so the primary combats gonna happen up here I'll have a little combat down there just just a little flavor combat but the big fights gonna be up here so in that first pass of all these rooms you know I was keeping keeping them really tight just to focus on the combat but even in this first pass I was still starting with the player in a safe place I was a disconnected platform it's out of line of sight and it didn't really convey safety too much but once we decided we liked the combat here we're gonna keep this room one of the first things we did was expand the opening of that refuge space so now there's like a little opening alcove to the lift and through some iteration we made this little section right before you get to the first enemies feel much more tight and closed off and a lot safer before you get out into the open this eventually this opening Alko got expanded you know

it had this drop floor moment and this like our elaborate entrance but in the end this this little space right before you got to remained without really tight blocking that we tried in earlier iterations so now I'm going to talk about this combat moment up here and a few things I did to make it punch here and feel more like a peak in the rooms interest curve on the front of isolating combat when you enter this section we do a camera lock on it and it's in order to really focus your attention on this fight and highlight that it's a more significant combat moment than those first two birds that you just dealt with and it also conveniently like hides the secret over in the corner at the same time we're also denying access to any refuge space by the because you get up on this platform and we wall you back in and practice it looks like this as soon as you get up there you get closed in the camera lock it clicks in the play and it's like okay now I have to really be on my game here there's no cover and it's a more dangerous scenario and you're forced to react more quickly in

an early version of this level I had the right side of the gap completely opened so you were also having to deal with dodging long-range attacks of the rifle Dirks while fighting the close-range Colt birds but it ended up being too much going on at once it was a little bit sloppy so we isolated that part as another pacing beat so you can see there's more combat to come but you know we isolate it from this main part and open it up partway through so it it just sort of eases out of the climax nicely it means there's a new threat to deal with you know the long-range guy but it's not like too intense and it just it just eases out super nice alright so hopefully that walkthrough gave you some context for how I was applying some these things many of them are connected and support one another but the point is that these level design muscles that I had built up doing 3d work still definitely applied in my workflow for the 2d stuff how I constructed space and how I made decisions so conclusion the

fears I had going into this project proved to be unfounded yes there were a lot of specific methods that didn't necessarily translate like anything relying on zSpace view or my considerations of spatial awareness had to change or even stuff like using those you know clothes ceiling heights to make the player feel and closed but the more generalized processes and principles that I referred to when designing the levels very much applied to both contexts my intuitions I'd built up making 3d games still worked and applied and once again these are about a small sample of the things that carried over there is actually a lot that was generally applicable and again I'm going to rip them in this book if you haven't read it it's great it's a it really helped me clarify a lot of things and and give some some terminology that was useful to me and then lastly if you're a designer that's practiced in making levels for a very specific sort of game don't fear if you find yourself in a situation where you have to branch out and do something different because your skills are very much transferable you

just have to trust yourself and look at the general principles behind the things you're doing instead of like the specific implementations and thank you very much that's my talk [Music] [Applause] so we have a time for questions if anyone wants to come up to the mics and ask a thing no questions or I could do a little dance what oh right hello hi so I I was actually curious like where all of the enemies in this project virtually complete by the time you started designing levels around them or was there a little bit of iteration on those in the process so the question was if the enemies were complete when I was building levels using them they weren't totally complete but there was a lot that had already been done in fact when

I was building those north rooms one of the reasons they put me on that was they had prototypes of North enemies already and they were wanted to see like you know what are the spaces like that we're gonna use these and we ended up like taking several of them and sort of combining their functionality to like cut individual enemy types and and you know figure out how we could get one enemy doing the same job of multiples so there was there was like a palette of enemies but there was still iteration to be done you know after after trying them out in the levels and seeing oh this guy this guy actually isn't very fun we should probably cut it and this guy can you know also do that job hi excuse me one thing I've noticed frequently happens when doing levels in 3d is that when art is applied many of the things break you don't have to be redone or adjusted that's wondering first of all you recognized this situation and going to 2d doesn't say anything happen or does it happen differently did you speak

to that on this particular project I didn't notice it being as much of a problem so the question was about how in 3d games often you know when you go from the gray box to the environment art gets in there then a lot of things break you know like visual cues or like cover heights or stuff like that and does did the same thing happen and I don't think it did but part of that is because you know it was a small team we were all working really closely together and you know they had they had already set up a pretty good pretty good established metrics for you know this is the sprite size this is the collision box you know we we can't change that but we can change the art and make it pretty like after I think alex is somewhere here in the audience after um you know we've done a lot of it he still had a lot of time to iterate and polish on the visual look but it didn't really disrupt the like the level design much at all but again I don't know if that's a quality of 2d or if that's just a quality of this team's process that they made okay thank you hello okay in 3d logo design

things like object placement lighting and wienies can guide players towards their goals and fed them from getting lost we introduced how many of those lessons were transferable and what he just kept along the way so the question is about basically how in 3d like placing objects to like lures players places or you know they show them like the goal of where they're trying to get to and did that apply in 2d it did actually that was one of my cut sections was about using rewards like denying rewards to like get the players curious and interested it just it's just a different approach because of the view so for example there was a part of the level where you know you have these blocks you can see the exit and you see up here like on a different level it's like you know it's one of the big things you're trying to collect and so you're like oh I need to get up there but rather than I need to get there and you know this is the steps I'm gonna take to get there it's I need to get there I know it's there I need to like go and

explore like off screen to find the way to get up there and have like a general relative idea of where to go so it it served a similar function of navigation but the way the player like carries it out was a bit different cool thank you very much all right I think I have time for one more one or two more two more okay okay yes hi thanks for the talk you said that there are you know situations were an environment artists break your work because they do whatever too much or art and they don't care about blocka forever but how do you approach this kind of copper my own art while doing the block out the first bus on me start to work on your block out do you like grab try to grab a feedback from environment artist to see how they feel and how they see the level yeah doesn't work so the question was how do you sort of cooperate with environment artists when you're building the level to you know get their input so that

things don't just break when art goes in and it's different it was different depending on the project depending on the company a lot you know on the games I worked on insomniac we work really closely with environment artists on the linear games so you know I remember you know going to the environment artists with my very initial maps being like I'm thinking something like this can you see any problems and he was like oh you're gonna have like line or draw problems in this area how about doing it this way so working really closely one-on-one like throughout the process helped sunset overdrive was a little different because since it was an open world it was more that we had like our main designer in charge of like the world traversal and the main environment artists they were like you know had this symbiotic brain relationship of you know building the world together and it was a lot more like using modular pieces from that and again similar like owning certain areas and communicating with the artists from those areas from the beginning and like I said on hyper light the team was very

small so it was just sort of naturally implied communication you know we would you know at the end of the day after I marked something up I'd have them come play and and you know Alex might be like this is gonna look kind of janky try and avoid you know jagged corners you know try you know he had a set of a set of metrics for visuals for how to make things look you know the best way they could and so what things to avoid so that had already been you know sort of established before I got on the team so was very useful in that regard thank you alright I think that's it thanks again everyone [Applause]