Benefits of Missing Out: What 'Cyberpunk 2077' Taught Us About Non-Linear Level Design

[Music] thank you all right hello and a warm welcome everyone my name is Miles toast and I have the honor to represent the bright minds of the cdpr level design team here at GDC today I've been working as a level designer at cdpr for more than 10 years now and currently have the privilege to lead the level design team on our upcoming Witcher game small disclaimer this timing or the timing of this talk will actually be pretty tight which is why unfortunately I believe there won't be any time for Q a here in this room however after the talk I will wander straight outside there's this little alcove and there I will gladly answer all of your questions until I drop so once again I'm so happy to see you all here and would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me

today I would like to tell you A five part story about how the cdpr level design team and I learned of the benefits of missing out My Hope with this talk is that I can provide you guys with some insights into the level design of cyberpunk 2077 and in the end a better understanding and a concrete set of principles of how to create non-linear levels that give each player no matter which path they pick a more special experience and our journey starts right at the beginning it's shortly before the release of our second Witcher 3 expansion blood and wine in early 2016 when I together with the other level designers start moving to cyberpunk 2077. after four years of working on a medieval fantasy world with wide open Landscapes relatively limited amount of ways to play a defined character no offense geralt and a third person perspective I couldn't wait to switch

working on a game that I learned couldn't be more different in regards to the challenges it would present I was hyped so what were we about to deal with cyberpunk 2077 takes place entirely in first person perspective in a claustrophobic megalopolis called night City unlike predefined Witcher geralt V our protagonist was meant to allow players the ultimate freedom to play who they want to be that is if we could pull it off no pressure from a high level all of our recent AAA RPGs are based on a few pillars that is the freedom in the story freedom in the world freedom in the gameplay when we look at these design pillars it's actually the first two which have been massive in driving the development of Witcher 3. it's the third one then freedom and gameplay that was the big

new addition to cyberpunk and this is where the gameplay and level design teams wanted to make a gigantic Leap Forward the inspiration for Ambitions came from immersive some Titans such as the original Deus Ex mind you it being cdpr we weren't the only discipline with huge Ambitions and dreams So based off these pillars we were presented by our directors with a few design goals style over substance is a model that is at the heart of Mike Ponce Smith's original pen and paper Universe which cyberpunk actually is based on why do something in a mundane way when you could do and go about it in style our goal was to give players the options to generally apply a generously apply the rule of cool to their characters and how they play them likewise we didn't want them to go do that and then end up in a dead end or with an unviable playstyle so every option they chose no matter the combo

should result in a valid way to play the game this is what freedom and gameplay was all about after all and in order to enable this level of Freedom we were asked to make levels that supported a ton of a ton of vastly different play styles that is melee versus ranged Mobility versus stability Brute Force versus Ingenuity and Combat versus stealth and we thought to ourselves levels supported by immersive Sim style systems and build as sandboxes what a dream and they all had to be part of a huge open world and take into account the complex branching narrative and cinematic focus of our quests with all their possibilities and outcomes oh now neither the studio no most of the four to five level designers working at the game on the game at the time had ever

done stuff like this before that includes myself but as insane as it sounded it also sounded [ __ ] awesome and boy were we after the challenge so how does one even begin to eat this whale this is a question for which it took us a long time to find an answer to our gameplay designers decided to base all of the abilities and perks of on the fantasies of the classes of the original pen and paper we didn't want to have fixed classes in cyberpunk 2077 freedom and all that but instead allow players to build their own by mixing and matching a ton of different perks abilities weapons and cyberware to effectively recreate the fantasy of the source games classes or anything in between knowing this we decided to structure our levels around the most purest character fantasies cyberpunk players would be able to create our archetypes representing the original

classes solo Netrunner and techie the theory was that if a player completely invested themselves into fulfilling a specific archetype they would get their own unique path through a level and now it would feel rewarding if a player mixed uh if players were mixing archetypes they would be able to follow one of the three paths for as long as they liked and if their abilities were not high enough um they simply found them or they found a more interesting way to Traverse the level they could simply switch to another path however what if they follow the path then got stuck for whatever reason without the necessary abilities to successfully switch to any other playstyle path So to avoid such situations we also added a Fail-Safe that is the generic path which was free

from any skill checks the generic path would be our fallback to ensure players could always progress down the critical path this was super important to us because we pride ourselves on being storytellers and we did not want a lack of a player's foresight to get in the way of them experiencing our narrative and to encourage better use of playstyles we also decided that the generic path should always be the most difficult one now this would often end up clashing with our storytelling requirements because it's often easiest to construct a great narrative around the One path that all players can pass no matter how they build their character and as a result of the generic path being the most difficult one conversely playstyle paths would provide the least resistance contributing to the power fantasies they should provide to players and this is how that would look like on

an actual level this is a gig location I had the opportunity to create the base block out for early in the game's development and because of that it reflects our initial designers assumptions really well and you can think of a gig as a relatively brief type of handcrafted open world mission first off the generic stealth and combat path here they actually coincide with stealth mostly being focused on waiting for opportune timing Windows to bypass enemy Patrols using double jump the solo can infiltrate the area through an alternative entrance and smoothly reach the goal that's probably hard to see on these but it is what it is the Netrunner can hack devices and manipulate enemies to create distractions to create their own timing windows back then we used hackable devices like a trail of breadcrumbs to lead the netrunner's way and finally the techie who could break in and use a

completely different route altogether techies initially had their own custom mechanic planned but in practice it played too closely to the netrunner's playstyle and in the end we couldn't really find and afford a meaningful difference between these two play Styles which led to the techie being downsculpt in importance to a more supporting playstyle as opposed to his own full archetype I also had the pleasure to be part of content team number two and my team members were Incredible without exception and together we were responsible for bringing the duty questline to life this is an example from the final game of our playstyles in action on one of my locations which we internally refer to as the brain Dance Studio as a level designer I was responsible for both the design and implementation of the location itself as well as the implementation of the encounters can you bring the volume back up please

[Music] oh my God [Music] [Music] [Music] oh wow

got the blueprint be there in a sec and here is actually the Brandon Studio played in a completely different way while designing and implementing encounters such as these we constantly had to balance the different play Styles and adjust our scripting to make sure all possibilities were playing in concert with each other you get everything inside [Applause] are you still alive I'm here got no time to creep around [Music] she's fine [Music] what where [Music] got the blueprint be there

[Music] now NPC Behavior would need to adjust to a sudden combat situation which in theory as you can see could occur at any time and at any moment of an encounter like this while our AI is able to handle a wide variety of situations reasonably well thanks to our great work of our gameplay designers and programmers in order to make sure our combat always felt right enemies would for example need to position themselves towards where we wanted the player to go relative to the player's position basically what I'm trying to say is that we often had to script not just the stealth sequences but also multiple combat scenarios all right so that didn't look so bad um I actually recall once walking past one of our testers using our bullet time ability sandovistan very much a combat skill to bypass patrols while stealthing

another time I saw a really good friend of mine Force his way into a building for which he did not have the proper tacky skill by punching a hole into a window with his bare fists over the course of a whole minute this looked really promising so let's ship it now the joke is about to come don't laugh yet now the launch of cyberpunk 2077 was really rough I'm sure many of you in here can relate to me when I say that making games such as cyberpunk 2077 is truly a dream come true at least for me and I'm proud to always give it my all to help do my part in realizing the wonderfully ambitious and demanding projects we work on at cdpr pouring your heart into a project and then having it cause so much disappointment despite your best efforts is crushing and my heart goes out to all the devs who have gone through similar

experiences but you trip you get back up in 2013 I started out in an environment where we wanted to prove that this small polish developer could redefine open world RPGs and as a team we were now back to wanting to prove that we're serious about learning from our mistakes and doing better it took us a few patches to finally gain some insight into how fruitful our efforts from Level design perspective actually were and overall it was pretty decent players were happy to experiment with their playstyles we even added a respect mechanic post launch to help them experiment even more and also the balance between validity of playstyles was also pretty good so there was no you know like dominant place over the other everyone was happy playing just what they wanted to play and of course we saw people play in ways we had not anticipated to me using throwing knives or silence pistols to

distract enemies was one of these examples however highly ambitious as we were we couldn't help but notice some criticism that kept coming up one was that players didn't really feel like whatever playstyle they picked mattered that much The Experience wouldn't actually drastically change and I have a suspicion that sentiment may have gotten even worse after we added that simple respect mechanic now it turns out though that on closer inspection this problem was pretty complex and LD was only one part of the equation we also would need to evaluate how our perk system would itself and even our own design mentality affected the problem that is when it comes to encounters on quests we basically were trying to create multiple highly polished linear experiences as opposed to interwoven ones where it's up to the player how much they experience if there was a cool or important thing

along the path we really didn't want the player to suffer a diminished experience because they missed it also you guys should have seen my Twitter inbox some of them can creatively compare our work to having combined noodles and raisins and waking up to that on launch day was truly something Jokes Aside though the positive outlook here is that despite it all people really care about the quality of our work and now it was on us to show them that we we did too all right so learning from mistakes and doing better becoming better starts with understanding one's own shortcomings and in Spring 2022 our level design team set itself a mission we wanted to evaluate what we could reasonably fix in patches or what we may want to look at to do better in the future and on that note I know the project Orion team is hiring for a Boston studio and you can find our

deaths here running around so if you're interested in that feel free to catch them okay to figure out what we level designer should do the team internally kicked off a research and development project every LD would try to find one level design related problem in cyrofunk 2077 analyze it propose a solution and present that to the team for further discussion and so I embarked on a new mission the problem the problem I wanted to research was the following level design in cyberpunk 2077 is focused on supporting various play stats by providing branching often non-linear designs yet since launch we have learned that players don't feel like play Styles and perks they commit to matter much other games feature less varic perks less options and yet those games seem to have succeeded where we have not

my mission objectives then were the following first I wanted to gain insight into how our level design contributes negatively to the feeling of play Styles not mattering and then I wanted to use that information to improve future designs to enhance the feeling of playstyles mattering and being fun so with the problem and my mission clearly stated it was time to come up with a plan my initial hunch was to go back to the formula and with the wisdom of hindsight revisit and analyze the games that inspired Us in the first place these were games such as arcanes Dishonored 1 and 2 rocksteady's Batman Arkham series and of course iron Storm's original Deus Ex as well as idos follow-ups and many more now then I wanted to dissect our work more closely in hopes of finding out the differences that may contribute to our problem

My Hope was that I could then formulate a set of principles based on what I would find which we could use to improve our future work and to further validate these principles I want to apply them theoretically simply to see what would happen so since I'm in love with the games that I mentioned before it would be easy for me to get excited and simply go all right guys we just need to build levels exactly like these guys do annoying myself I decided to do a little reality check after replaying them first off we put um we put our narrative first it's our trademark and everything we do is meant to contribute to telling a great story in an open world that feels real and affords the player many freedoms with for example no loading screens which meant that building exteriors and Interiors always had to

match secondly because of the size of our world we need to make a ton of content cyberpunk 2077 features more than 85 gigs almost 40 main missions and more than 25 side missions most of which feature one or multiple bespoke custom locations and thirdly because of these first two points we can always brute force a solution by simply providing completely different paths which individually would compare to a single level in our game so that meant whatever principles I wanted to form should consider our production reality and thus be broken down enough so that we could apply them even on a smaller scale and now if this seems like a relatively well put together plan the reality is that I had no clue what I was going to find or if any of this would result in anything meaningful but onward we March

and I found two major issues that kept repeating throughout our levels it's not like all of them were affected by both of these issues in the same way but it's happened often enough that on closer inspection it was definitely noticeable to make sure the generic path was a reliable fallback we often made it super obvious and this resulted in us inadvertently streamlining the experience to the point where yes the generic path was the fallback but it also became the most obvious one why pick a playstyle path when the genetic solution is so close easy to reach and obvious certainly our guidance systems with paths two objectives being displayed on the minimap also didn't do as many favors here the other issue I kept finding was related to how we seed cool optional content if you take a look at this on a 2 for example and here shout out to the team over at Arcane we're big fans of

your work we see that as soon as the player actually moves from the golden path they are bound to run into some cool things this is a cool way to reward players with unique experience but it also means that depending on which path you pick and what you find there the information the player has about the world can be slightly different in an effort to make sure that players would experience the best possible narrative we often would put the coolest and most important things following the generic path because this way we could make sure all players would be able to experience it this becomes especially obvious and problematic when we look at the way we could we would utilize skill checks for this we look at a somewhat extreme example but it is in the game in this Mission the player gets in close contact with a new gang which Prides themselves on their physical strength

and then years ago now it is not animals fix their eyes [Music] wait who was that oh you think we won't try to evade you for the extra eyes we give you blue [Music] these ones got emotions sensor only reacts when you move new models got muscle memory seams react to your engagement the new ones know what I'm going to do before following the genetic path me and my intimidatingly skilled colleague Danish markiewicz made sure that you'd see a lot of custom chatter to give a background to this new gang it's a cool it's quite the cool experience actually which even features some custom interactions such as this

one [Music] foreign you can also see how we somewhat abandoned the One path per play style approach if you're a Netrunner you don't just want to follow a trail of breadcrumbs with utility for you but mess around with devices no matter which path you pick and same goes for other playstyles come on Fox just look at it ultimately we just decided to give people as many cool options as we could fit on the level and that worked reasonably well and was also simpler to design for

right [Music] [Music] remember okay and we're in the big main hall of this location now let's see what happens if the player makes use of their invested skills to unlock another Passage

[Music] yep and that's the exit of the gym that we just left and it's incredible and highlights how sometimes the cost of enhancing the value of invested skills for the player could be quite low imagine if we had chosen to do it the other way around and treat this side passage as the generic path with the gym being unlocked by a skill check that way your skill check would have unlocked an awesome new section for you rewarding you with a cool and unique experience to summarize our issues then first our plan to use the generic path as fallback turns into a bit of a trap on execution resulting in it often being the most obvious Solutions which players would pick only too happily that is

secondly oftentimes we would add reward to the challenge generic should provide by also making it the path with a cool bespoke experience to fulfill our goal to present a great story We tended to Cluster all our cool content related to Exposition lore cool encounters secrets and sometimes even loot at bottlenecks in the level like in the end that in by itself is not such a big problem actually if you only want to create a cool cinematic narrative experience however looking at it from the perspective of creating memorable non-linear experiences in gameplay it's hard to give real value to play styles with this approach revisiting our initial approach then we find that the generic path as fallback is actually one of the main contributors of devaluing your our paths because on execution it ended up diluting the

experience by over emphasizing streamlining to a fault as for the difficulty of the generic and play style paths our approach resulted in a multitude of skill checks being used to Simply bypass encounters which in hindsight sounds relatively insane players invest their hard-earned attribute and perk points and as a reward they get to experience less of the game well at least now you guys know where we were coming from with the knowledge of what went wrong I went back and took a look at many of our own levels and wondered how we can marry our cinematic storytelling while still providing varied non-linear experiences in our level truthfully the outcome of our work wasn't bad on the aspect of providing the player Rich non-linear experiences it was merely weaker than we had intended

based off my comparison between our levels and other games I decided to expand on some concepts of what we already knew about non-linear level design to also Define how we set up the action and reward structure in our levels and I call the resulting concept Discovery and exploration Discovery and exploration is a method to structure your level which expands the concept of analysis a beat in which the player observes and formulates their plan and execution the beat in which the player executes their plan the concept focuses on setting up choices and providing payoff to give players a more special experience on each path they pick and like the concept it is based on it consists of two distinct alternating beats each with their own characteristics and purpose this method focuses on Beats as part of the reward structure of a level meaning that individual beats can and should very much still be flavored is it a more

combat heavy or the opposite Does it include environmental puzzles Secrets story Exposition Etc let's take a closer look at the individual beats starting with a discovering one this beat is primarily about the player discovering their options making their choices and overcoming challenges not always but often this is where you will use your informative OverWatch so not much Revolution here however from a narrative function perspective this is the establishing shot of your location it is here that we set the mood and give the player what they need to know it's also where we plant some seeds to tease what players might find in later parts of the level however it's important to not overspend your budget here so it's crucial to not shoot all of your powder and save some for later

once the player made their choice and successfully passed through the discovery area they now find themselves in the ex in our exploration beat and the exploration B provides a more intimate and linear experience compared to Discovery it does this by narrowing down the level and what the player can see of the rest of the location restricting them to the path they have chosen the intent is to let the player focus on exploring and experiencing the choice they committed to and this beat is less about making new choices and much more about the consequence of choosing it's the payoff for having chosen now this is the moment for some cool intimate experiences World building puzzles special encounters Secrets expanding on the context of the levels narrative whatever you can think of to make this cool as a result we get two beats which complement each other

Discovery is all about providing choices and presenting the player with Promises of the awesome that they are about to uncover exploration is where that awesome lives it's the player experiencing the consequences of their choice of picking a path and for doing so exploration rewards the player it's not only great from the player's perspective but also from ours as storytellers this structure allows us to still expose the player to important narrative elements in cinematic moments while giving the individual player a more unique experience used well the exploration beat can provide more context for our narrative and build on it and thus enhance it nonetheless this concept works best the more okay one is with the player potentially missing cool stuff due to my research I do genuinely think it is okay for players to miss cool things if they do it and only if they do it by experiencing other cool stuff

basically keeping the net gain for the player and balance let's look at how that concept might look like applied to our level the brainland studio we see that the foundation of analysis and execution are there classic level design setup One Beat to analyze your path from a vantage point another to get close to the action and execute your plan when we rethink it with the concept of Discovery and exploration the beat setup changes to focus on providing choices and promising rewards than granting them we still apply the same theory of analysis and execution and Discovery but our Focus changes from this perspective there's actually room for improvement mainly in the payoff the exploration beat provides more on that in a minute please try to make a mental note here I mentioned earlier that as part of my mission I wanted to find a set of useful

principles to help make different paths feel more special and I did in addition to Discovery and exploration these principles are widely applicable even on smaller levels and through specific actions a level designer might use these to improve on their designs our first of three principles I want to share with you focuses on the proximity of different paths in a level to each other take a look at these two entrances if you if you can see them this is a bit of an extreme example but even though the player has a choice here does it really feel like a choice worth making the proximity of these two entrances leaves little room for mystery as to whether these paths are actually any different remember the brightness Studio from earlier and how I mentioned the exploration beat needing Improvement well here we're actually looking at it white represents the intended generic paths and green are the play style class

what happens is that even when we apply vertical distance to a path as long as the paths are close to each other they're still perceived as the same path because the proximity results on them running vertically parallel to each other and in part to this the expiration beat fails to provide meaningful rewards by making each choice result in a very similar payoff so principle number one then the perception of distance this principle tries to give the players the perception that they have a choice to make which path do I pick the closer paths are to each other the less it feels like picking one actually makes a difference and while verticality can be a valid way of creating distances for entrances the same cannot be said about the paths themselves it's important that your paths are perceived by players as being distance to each other to enhance the feeling of

them being different and leading to different outcomes on the extreme end this is why having completely different paths through a location is so cool but potentially very expensive so what can we as level designers do to enhance a player's perception of distance between paths and entrances well generally try to design entrances and paths as far away from each other as reasonably possible kind of makes sense however it's not so much about the actual distance between the paths as much as it is about the perceived distance that means anything that can help make paths feel distant from each other like building a layout in which visibility is limited setting up encounters or skill checks to make access to the Past more difficult can also help generally I recommend a quality over quantity approach especially in smaller locations where it may be hard to properly distance many paths from each other

rather have two that have a high perception of distance then three which are too close to each other in the setup here you can see a typical example of a playstyle entrance allowing for a separate access to a location this in by itself is fine but if we look at the flow of the paths we can see that the way the location is built the initial question of I wonder where that other path may go is revealed to the player without them ever actually having to use that path it exposes that in the end the path they pick really did not matter all that much so while principle number one tries to build Choice principle number two focuses on building and more importantly maintaining an air of mystery around the choices through principle number one the player becomes aware that they need to make a choice principle number two a perception of exclusivity prevents them from

knowing the alternative outcome and heightens the sense of wonder the more exclusive and isolated path Fields the more special it can become in the player's mind without a perception of exclusivity we destroy all chances of players to even wonder whether another path might result in a different outcome through perception of exclusivity we can also allow a player to fully focus on the experience provided From the Path they picked and this in turn heightens a player's curiosity about the possible alternative outcomes they could have experienced as a level designer how do I make my past feel more exclusive especially if I'm on a tight budget one of the most cost effective ways I found to increase the perception of exclusivity for players is to limit and control what a player can see that means breaking and line breaking line of sight of the player to

Alternative paths and entrances to prevent them from figuring out how they work without ever having to use them furthermore to fully allow the player to focus on the path commit them to a choice by using one-way drops and passages however if your game is all about providing Freedom like ours with little notion of punishing the player allow them to switch between paths but only at a cost for example by making them decide whether they rather stay on the path they picked or try to sneak past a particularly deadly enemy all right principle number three I think is the easiest to understand but maybe not so such an easy one to commit to [Music] for your own safety please maintain silence [Music]

all right guys don't judge in 2077 even robots need some love see that this landed well [Laughter] um but onwards we March all right all right our last principle for today focuses on validating the choices the player made or rather the choice the player made a perception of uniqueness fulfills the player's desire to have made the right choice while at the same time heightening the stakes and the excitement of making one and for that to work we need to treat our paths as special and plan proper payoff for players and be okay with other players potentially missing out this is what creates value in the choices players make a choice is not interesting without a proper consequence or in this case payoff this goes for narrative choices as much for as for once done in gameplay like how we navigate through a level

the player did their part they made the choice and now it's on us as designers to make it worth their time and give them a shot providing a perception of uniqueness is of course done by making sure we allocate budget and find affordable solutions to give the players exclusive content and this is really where the individual designers and small teams can shine and I'm sure many of you have experienced at least one instance where some kid someone kid bashed a cool experience out of seemingly nothing at cdpr we have so many Incredible Minds especially amongst our quests and open world designers who excel at this one of this guys is actually Paulo sasko over there a quest director thanks to him and some others we can have nibbles and iguana as a pet in the game side note my friend Pavel will be holding a talk tomorrow that you should definitely check out in it he also outlines how we design impactful

narrative choices for players all right getting back to providing cool experiences we even created a whole type of content in cyberpunk 2077 we lovingly call Mini World stories that gives individual designers the room to mess around and increase the perception of uniqueness while at the same time breathing more life into our world like the dancing robots or the car bomb encounter for those who know it as for level designers in addition to providing a cool unique uh to providing cool unique set pieces and visual storytelling perhaps a cool custom encounter we can also build our locations in a way that we prevent bottlenecks ending in the same room seeing the exit of another path May remind that it is there and make you wonder but it also ultimately tells you that in the end all paths lead to Rome there's more gain in masking this and hiding away those entrances to instead

keep the player wandering after the fact wait there used to be another path I wonder where that went as you can see much like Discovery and exploration these principles complement and build on each other theory is good however but often it can be hard to imagine how it translates into practical use cases I mentioned at the beginning I wanted to apply these principles to validate them so let's do that this is a top-down shot from an experimental blockout I created for research purposes it was created before I started out on my research and development project and you can tell white paths are the generic playstyles in the middle we have the combat one and above in the north we have the stealth one green paths are play Styles the numbers are entrances to the level and the letters are exits or goals leading to a lower floor

just as before blue zones are Discovery beats and orange ones exploration though admittedly I did not think about them like that at the time of the making of that blockout and again all the symptoms are here there's very low payoff for playstyle paths principle number one perception of distance is violated with the playstyle up above compared to the generic stealth path we also violate Violet violate principle number two perception of exclusivity starting at entrance number two players will inevitably see where entrance number one basically if they hadn't used their skill check would have started now equipped equipped with what I had learned I set out to apply the beads and principles the second iteration of this blockout sees a small section added to the bottom right corner one and additional passages down to the lower floor

but let's get through this step by step first the beat breakdown you can see now the distribution between Discovery and expiration is quite a bit more even and we have room to provide meaningful Rewards I added additional ways for the players down to the lower floor with no direct line of sight to each other even leading up to the passages themselves at the time the player reaches any of the passages a b or c they'll have they will have been locked into their more linear exploration beat for quite a while increasing the perception of exclusivity in adding the new section I tried to enhance the perception of distance of the choices the player has in the discovery beat by moving the entrances to the exploration beats as far from each other as possible I also changed the setup of the paths with the generic path now leading

straight through the middle of the section at almost no additional cost I turned the path going from 1 to B into a playstyle exclusive while also providing a play Star exclusive branch to enter lower floor access C of the generic stealth path going from 2 to a the new section actually looks bigger than it is here it's effectively one room and two corridors plus the branch so we can so again relatively low cost now let's bring some Nuance into this since I had this discussion with some of my fellow level designers after getting feedback from them while it's important to make sure Vision doesn't give away how paths work we can we can and should still carefully and consciously work with it to help the player of course build a mental map and navigate the space better in each expiration beat the player is able to take a peek at the room in the center of this location which features a characteristic Landmark to help the player understand a bit how they're

moving around the location on the path they've picked you also have an opportunity to do this when using the hidden pass HC the vision here provided however does not give away how the alternate paths may work finally let's take a look at the lower floor to see the how the passages enter into that space here the letters are simply the continuation of the exits on the floor above notice how none of the paths end in the bottleneck that is the Discovery Zone here from none of the entrances into the area can you actually see any of the other options the player could have taken now think about the beats and applying principle number one and principle number two what about principle number three the perception of uniqueness well with the new section added in the northernmost path being turned into a playstyle path I now had the room to

enhance the perception of uniqueness and let's take a brief tour across the level to see how the location itself tries to give the player unique experiences and zones to explore starting with the genetic stealth path with the Playstar exclusive branch so entrance to to exit C as the player enters enters this level they find themselves in this space over here and stealthing past the enemies through the door on the right they entered this new room that I added in the second iteration now it's hard to see here especially I suppose in this situation but there is a hidden passage here that techies can unlock to reach a hidden underground Passage and finding that in going through that puts you into this situation here a unique little set piece which only those players would be able to find that gives more information about the background of what this space could be and now let's take a look at the other playstyle exclusive path in comparison

so path one to Exit B as those players enter the location they find themselves in this area over here and where they actually have the option to look into the room that the other path just stealth through moving through a door on the left they find themselves in the big room with the landmark I mentioned earlier in and successfully stealthing for this section on the left side they find themselves in this room where in the background there's also a small little window that again looks back into the The Landmark room and stealthing through this you can make your way down to the lower floor where you see this section and as you can see the paths provide completely different experiences each giving their own little slice an impression on the player what's going on here all right let's summarize I equip you guys with

three principles to enhance your non-linear designs principle number one distance builds choices and you can enhance it by making sure to spread entrances and paths as far away from each other as possible principle number two exclusivity heightens wonder which you can enhance by limiting the player's Vision on other paths and committing the player to their choice using one-way passages principle number three fulfills desire which you can enhance by reserving and providing cool content for players and by avoiding to shatter the Illusion for paths leading to the same outcome by not having them bottleneck into the same room all three of these principles are not restricted to but particularly effective and enhancing the powers of two different level beats designed to maximize choice and reward that is Discovery and exploration as always in our design related disciplines however nothing is always

100 true and all these Concepts heavily depend on the context of your game hopefully this is still useful Food For Thought for you with my research done and principles tested I see my quest as updated and I'm happy to see to say that the XP I gained provided a worthy payoff Great quest good play again and now you know about the benefits of missing out I put a lot of heart and effort into bringing you this and I hope you found this valuable and fun from the bottom of my heart I want to say thank you thank you thank you for joining me here today doing a thing like this isn't easy it's a lot of work and you know there's a lot of imposter syndrome going on when trying to do this uh however there's my contacts please feel free to reach out to me also a big shout out to Blake for getting me into this and coaching me thank you so much you're awesome and thank you to GDC and the level design Summit team for

inviting me I'll be over at the wrap up area in a moment ready to answer your questions and uh yeah see you there thank you foreign also if you enjoyed this talk please go check out the ones that my amazing colleagues are about to give I'm sure you'll find them insightful as well we're here all week guys [Music]