Hitman Levels as Social Spaces: The Social Anthropology of Level Design

[Music] hello guys thanks for coming out so yeah this talk is called hitman levels the social spaces the social anthropology of level design my name is midden and i'm from io interactive oh and i've also been told to just ask you to put your phones on silence just in case so this talk is divided into three parts the first is the context i just want to tell you just a little bit about me and i owe what hitman is in case you haven't played what it means to be a level designer at i o interactive then i want to tell you the story so this is pretty much about how i when i started i o and we launched hidden in 2016 and how that went down i want to talk about a specific level that was super popular in a level that is super close to my heart as well um and then i want to introduce you to the concept of social spaces and then we have the learnings i want to

tell you about how we used social spaces to look at all the levels and compare them in hitman 1 and what that meant for us going into creating hitman 2. all right so this is sammy some years ago um i just got my first computer i was sitting in an exciting day and i got to paint the walls of my room as well it's a jungle theme in case you can't see it so i work at io which is right there that's denmark in case you don't know denmark we made lego that's us so you're welcome then there was an incident with a giraffe a few years ago i don't know if you remember we killed a giraffe and showed it to a bunch of kids it was awful but anyways in case maybe now you remember us and we have a queen it's a monarchy it's very weird she doesn't really decide much but she's pretty cool um actually and we make hitman very proud of hitman

so what i'll be talking about is hitman that we call internally hitman 2016 and i'm going to talk about hitman 2. so what's special about these two particular installments of the series that's a quite old series like we started the first hitman was in 2000 but here is where we really defined um the game in a way like we went back to um the concepts of blood money like where we make these deadly sandboxes as we call them we went back to a different recipe a different design mantra we wanted to talk about freedom of approach and creativity uh really giving the player um the chance to design how they want to play the game and do their own approach and of course that meant a lot for the level design as well so level design at i o uh the reason why i have this slide because i know a lot of you probably know what level design is um is because i heard that it's a little

bit different at i o and i assume it's different everywhere it seems like such a broad field so i thought i would just want to try and explain what is it actually we do at io so we think design is of course as you know like about coming up with different approaches like ideas and and solving different problems so and the level design is quite central in just coming up with stuff for the levels we're often being asked to pitch the levels uh pitch targets locations anything we're really central part of the early process of this and preferably we should try and do something a little bit different little creative cool kills and stuff right then we're part of the layout process of course and this is where we work very closely with environment artists our artistic counterpart the one who knows how things should actually look and how it looks realistic [Music] yeah and yeah it's a it's an important process that we try and keep outside the

editor we do a lot of paper prototypes and a lot of different mock-ups layouts to see how it feels and i will say when we do it for hitman levels we talk a lot about the different activities that we want to have in a level so we mark our activities first like different disguises and stuff like that and then we try to to look at how would it actually feel like how how would you represent it in a physical way afterwards then we mock up in the editor with gray box white box all that stuff whatever you call it and then the environment artist tells us that's weird you wouldn't have that many covers everywhere and then we implement pretty much everything my producer said when she had to explain what level design means for other people or to other people she would say it starts and ends with a level designer or starts and ends with level design we implement pretty much everything that goes into the game we touch everything at some point uh and that's everything from like set pieces that game designers make for us

and different acts that the animators make for us dialogue everything and then we talk meetings and stand-ups and we constantly constantly talk to other people um the level designer is a product owner at iom so as the main level design on a project you own the level and you're responsible for making sure that everything flies and that you talk to everyone in the um in the team and we have an awesome team really really talented people um and then we do janitor work i guess this is the same everywhere if people ask me at the end of the production what do you do i just say i'm a janitor i'm a janitor just walk the halls at the levels and make sure things are still working yes um this is what it looks like when we're in the editor um and this is just like a like a small simple setup but the reason i'm showing you this is because it's a really

central part of what we do apart from locking everything up one of the most important things that we do in a game like hitman is making life creating drama situations as we call them we borrowed a little bit from the world of theater we talk about dramas and acts and rules and this is just like a like a simple setup we just have a guy who's on the phone i just want to show you this just for context so you know what it looks like all right so another thing that's super central when we design levels is looking at trespass where can you actually go when you when you start the level and this is a situation from miami in hitman 2 it's the first level you're at a race event and right now i'm trying to get into a backstage area but i'm not allowed because it's a big public event and back here is like for employees only but if i become the the

mascot of the event this cool flamingo obviously i can go there um and all of a sudden i'm allowed this is what we call social stealth um so you try to blend in and this is what makes hitman the the best assassin in the world in in our world is that he's willing to do anything to get wherever he needs to go i just want to show you like a quick video because i think someone else did a really really good job of showing you the different ways that you can infiltrate in our games yeah and i'm just going to show you this quick quick video all this time with each attempt each creative assassination and each unique exit you're learning you're learning the level you know that you can get into the mansion by dropping down here or climbing over here [Music] or popping in this window or going up from the pier

or using a key card or blowing up this wall or just walking in the front door you're learning the schedule of your targets you know that francesca will come down to the lab on her own if the virus is destroyed or that caruso will come to the observatory if the roof is opened up you're learning which disguises will let you into which parts of the mansion ways to separate the targets from their guards where to get keys and key cards and which exits you can take [Music] yes and i actually recommend that video if you're into hitman level design he's uh yeah he he's super talented um so yeah so that was the context me io hitman level design rule you know everything now so that's good now i want to talk about the story what actually happened um yeah and talk about this this level that did did really well okay so in 2016 sorry

for the white screen we launched and what was so special about this launch was the fact that it's uh it was episodic it was the first aaa episodic game maybe probably still the only one i'm not sure um and i had just started right i was a new designer i was an intern at the time i was just trying to figure out how do you make a good level in this crazy game like how do you actually do that and what happened was that we would get a mesa score for each level we launched um and that makes for a super excellent case for for you know actually trying to find out how like how do we do it what works what doesn't work uh it's a little awkward for the work environment i will say uh like two tables down someone got a different major score than you did that was really weird so i can't recommend it but it was super

interesting and this got me started like thinking okay um like what worked and sapienza which was the second level that we ship was where we really seemed to convince at least the reviewers um that this was this was working out really well uh and it was really everyone that seemed to love this level it was our um our fans and it was user research and i love that level personally as well it's this italian coastal town you just saw there was the same one in the clip before um i know it's actually just awesome to go and work in that level because it was like sunny and awesome so i just felt like i was on vacation when i was just working on it was really strange um but yeah i tried to to sort of dive into you know what makes this cool because it's it was a it's you know the weather is nice it's a nice place it's beautiful to look at there's all these things the the village is um like you have this

big villa in the middle and then you have like this village that's surrounding it um and the objective is to kill silvio caruso francesca the census and destroy the virus that they have in the basement but when i looked at the reviews everything they seemed to talk about actually didn't have anything to do with the mission it like they were all describing how it felt to just be there to just walk around in this beautiful little village that had all these little stories and these weird like characters and these nice little places to visit so i love the ice cream guy he's getting figured out so my question became instead of like how do you make an awesome level i i decided to dive into something a little bit different i wanted to find out how do you design everyday life and how do you design believable everyday life because that really seemed

to be what people were describing so i looked at my level design toolbox and i had all these cool like like concepts and and terminology to describe the gameplay elements of it like how do you make nice trespass and sentries and blah blah but i didn't actually have anything that could help me solve this problem or answer this question so i went back to the books i had one semester of social anthropology in university and some of this stuff just seemed to click for me when i started to think of it in that way instead so i went back to pia badger and erin goffman who are specialists within sociology and aaron goffman is also from the field of anthropology and they describe some pretty cool things pierre-johy talks about social capital he also coined the

term social space and his idea is basically that that we are all in the social marketplace exchanging capital um and if you do one thing in one social group that's gonna um that's gonna get you in in a way right that you you like for instance if i buy like a fur coat in one social group that's going to make me look super cool in another one they're going to hate me for it so you know you have to choose wisely as you're navigating this social marketplace and evan goffman he talks about front stage backstage which i think is like one of the most applicable things also to hitman so that's the idea that we have different um personas depending on where we are and what we're doing so when i'm standing here talking to you i'm front stage matter but when i'm crying in the bathroom afterwards i'm backstage matter so and i think like this is really interesting when you start just looking at spaces what like what are the rules of spaces in general

um when you're in a job interview it's a super tense situation this space has kind of been laid out for you it's going to be four chairs you're not allowed to sit in those it's going to be a table between you and you're going to sit in that one chair being judged by the other right that is the that is the setup of that room and you just you know like what that's going to be like it's going to be uncomfortable and it's designed to be uncomfortable i think in a way [Music] and the square i think these are really interesting because they don't have uh rules in a way like it's they have them but they're very vague there's no owner of it there's like not like that one person who's gonna be like you know put those pants back on you know it's it's a lot more a lot of different spaces can meet in a space like this and a lot of different people and it can change depending on who's there um a sports student [Music] you know it's that you know you can almost do anything in a sports event as

long as you're just you know voting for the right team um and and doing it at the right time and i think this really applies to games as well when we design these spaces um and that could be any game it doesn't have to be hitmen we're designing uh rules of behavior and we're designing uh you know something that's going to tap into your to your knowledge of how should i be in this space and it's very subtle like people walk into these spaces and they don't go like oh now i'm in a church i'm gonna be like this no they just they just do it without without thinking about it um and that's very very powerful i think okay so i tried to take these concepts and make it applicable to hitman levels so i divided into two different categories so public private uh private just being anything that's trespass public is anything that's available to

you when you start playing the game and then i defined it a little bit further than that i'm just gonna go through all six of them just so you know and give you examples so the first one is a public space this is the square it's the park it's like the space where you feel like you can kind of do anything and you won't be judged there's going to be no expectations towards you um this is where the player can just like relax wait take their time uh you know look in their inventory not feel like an idiot and these are just really great spots to just let the player breathe they're great for starting locations then the next one is the public purpose space and this is where we just ramp it up just a little bit like there's still no one who owns the space necessarily but you feel like you should be doing maybe a specific activity when you're here um like this like a back alley it could be a cul-de-sac it could be like a market place anything

where you kind of you feel like you should have a purpose when you're here and these are great spaces for just like creating life um and flow in the level then we have the public rule space this is one of my favorite spaces so these are the spaces that are again still like available to you from the start but they have super strong social rules like this is where you know that you should behave in a very specific way like the church or an ice cream shop and they're great for roleplaying because they you know as you walk in the player knows like this is the way i should behave but i can also go against it and break you know break the rules act like an idiot and that's fun too um and they're really really good for us and when we have to communicate uh trespass rules because often when you have a super powerful rule space then the player will just know okay i'm not allowed um you know behind that door into the the priest's private private room of course i'm not allowed

there and i know there's going to be a priest i know there's going to be a choir board i know all this stuff i don't i don't have to tell the player anything it's awesome you know it's just it's it's ripe for the picking then we have the private space kind of like the first public space it's very vague uh it's just this is just trespass there's not necessarily going to be a lot of people or someone who owns the space or any special activities but these are really really important too really important because these give you little breathers so you need to make sure that they're there as well they're represented as well you don't want to cram it with too much stuff private professional yeah so these are like like the most important for us when we design spaces because this is where we can just um there's going to be specific rules you're probably not going to be allowed there when you start but the player can easily figure out who's allowed here like the kitchen the kitchen is like one of our favorite rooms in hitman because

so many things can go wrong in a kitchen it's a nice place for accidents and you know you can find boys in there all that stuff it's they're nice but they're really good for social stealth they're good for role playing because again yeah you can just walk and you know i'm going to be a chef i'm going to stand here and chop some onions and no one's going to notice me [Music] yeah and then the private personal space so this is the reward for the player like we don't have a lot of these and we shouldn't they're like these little gyms in the level this is where you um where we tell you who the target is through the environment this is really where you feel like whoa okay i've i've gotten super close to target now i'm not allowed to be here there's so much stuff here that's going to tell me how to manipulate them or or take them out and these are just yeah great for stealth social stealth and role playing but you shouldn't have too many of these it's uh they need to feel special okay so i tried applying all of these uh

and trying to map it out on sapien so to try and see is there anything that stands out from doing this [Music] and one of the things that struck me was the fact that the public area is just enormous in this level um square meter wise it's not half because like the uh the mansion has like many um many different storages and you have like the whole cave and all that stuff and as you get into the church like there's more stuff but but it's an enormous area and it really allows the player to get all the way around the mansion which we coined the fortress because we have lots of these fortresses in our levels and you have a chance to just traverse and you have a chance to just see well how do i want to get in i really have a chance to just find all of these different opportunities to either infiltrate our fortress or try to pull out our

targets yes so now you know about all this stuff you're experts and now we can talk about the learning so where i just want to compare it to the other levels in hitman 1 and just talk about what did we decide to do for hitman 2 so i did this on all of them it took a while it looks simple but [Laughter] to try and see like what can we learn from this and there's like there's tons of little things i'm not going to go too much into details but i am going to talk about two levels that are really sticking out one of them you know sapienza diano other one is colorado down here in the corner so what is of course super obvious as you look at it is the fact that colorado is only trespass when you start the level uh you're trespassing it's a hostile environment you're not allowed to be here good luck um and i just want to say first of all like i think this is an awesome level um

but it did get a lot of critique and it it got a lot lower major score than sapienza did major scores are not everything i'm really not trying to say that you should always be critical but i think it's um it's interesting to see what happens when you take away half of our tools in making a hitman level because yeah this is basically what we're doing we're only using half of the palette and the way that this looks from the top is actually quite representative of how it feels when you're playing it everything is kind of it's very hard to define the different areas it's sort of murky everything is soldiers uh it's it's this orchard that they've taken over uh and it's really hard to figure out okay these soldiers are allowed here but they're not allowed over here but in sapienza you know the ice cream guy is a lighter allowed over here and the priest is allowed over here right so it's com it's a different metaphor that we're using it's very hard to tell apart

um okay so i'm just gonna go through the findings just so you know uh where we are it was four like big things that we felt like were worth worthwhile uh highlighting so public spaces are just very useful for us because it just represents the initial agency of the player it shows you where the player can actually go when they play the level just when they start and they have a chance to just get an overview figure out what they want to do the public rules base are just they're just so powerful uh when playing into player expectations uh and and we we enjoy uh when our expectations are being fulfilled it just feels nice it's like oh it's an ice cream shop i wonder what's oh it's there was eyes in here like you know it's it feels nice you're kind of like i already know what i'm doing uh um the private personal spaces are just so rewarding um because they just they create this

backstage experience that evan goffman is talking about right where you feel like i'm on to them now they're super expensive to make because it's just so many special unique assets and all that stuff but they're worth it they're really really worth it yeah and by using the whole palette uh it's just way easier for us to just create interesting levels um and where players can figure out what to do and how the whole thing ties together it feels more believable and yeah and more rich so we turned these into four objectives we wanted to create large and meaningful public spaces we wanted to create rule spaces that plays with the play expectations we want to create these rewarding personal spaces i want to use the whole social space palette and i think we did that

we've all got barcodes on the back of our heads most people just never noticed i know what it's like to have everything taken from you [Music] it's a dangerous thing having a conscience [Music] why are you doing that i like to think no one's untouchable

[Music] yes okay so i just want to take you through what hitman 2 looks like now um so this is miami this is the first level of hitman 2. it's an innovation race and you're here to eliminate the ceo of cormstadt who is in that big building on the top uh which we call the expo building the cornstax building and his daughter sierra nox who's a race driver she's gonna she's driving in her car and at a point she's gonna sort of roam around in these public areas um so i did the same thing uh to just try and see what it looks like uh and it's okay if you don't go like oh okay like instantly you have all the information uh i just want to show you um this is the public space uh and and i really feel like we

we took all these findings and i really think we we apply them in a really really good way um and even though you can go this far right when you start it doesn't mean that it's an easy level i don't know if any of you have played it but there's still a lot of work to do and i think it's just really enjoyable that you can get this far and like basically get all the way around our fortress to get an idea of how the whole level is shaped out so i'm just going to show you some pictures of our large and meaningful spaces but i feel we created yeah this is also from miami this is mumbai also an enormous level i think it must be the biggest level we've ever made and almost like so much of it is public you have these big two fortresses on either side and everything else apart from a few areas it's just public you can you can get almost everywhere to just

get an idea um center for tuna this is kind of our colombian sapienza it's also it's an amazing level with this um this drug cartel mentioned in the middle and you have like jungle you can explore and you have this this whole fishing village wilton creek the suburbia level in vermont yeah and as long as you don't trespass on people's like property then you can just you can just keep uh traversing our social spaces i think we yeah there's some really interesting ones in season two um we have the the stands where you can watch the race there's a pretty cool moment in the barbershop i don't want to kill in there if you kill anything whoops freudian i don't want to reveal anything yeah the bar in center for tuna the barbecue of course you need a barbecue when you're in suburbia right

i wonder what's going to happen here oh and this is i think this is a cool example i love scale so i talked a lot about sort of using everyday life experiences right for creating rule spaces obviously you don't always have to do that you can also like we have all these expectations based on movies and fiction so here we're going a little bit with a nice wide shot uh and all that stuff uh yeah yeah in our personal spaces i think we yeah there's some really i feel like i'm spoiling a lot right now by showing you these it feels different when you're there so i think you should go try them out our slum queen in mumbai she's taken over this huge train yard it's a super cool location and where we have our uh ceo of cornstard yes okay so i just want to do like a little quick like um

reflection on how this uh like how what happened when we did this um so obviously someone made sapienza before uh i started drawing colors on it someone did all this stuff without having these social spaces being so formalized so this was just an exercise of formalizing knowledge that was already in the company it just wasn't accessible to me as a new designer so by doing this you help new people get into it faster and we use this analysis also for our embedded teams in sumo and yeah just for for new people joining the company um it helped us develop a terminology and and words started popping up that had nothing to do with this thing i used some of them already we have the fortress the dweller is a target that lives in a fortress and won't come out so you have to go in and get them then we have a roamer which is a target that's gonna you know roam around in the public spaces and

this like we're forcing the player to try different approaches um if they got super good at infiltrating well maybe you have to think about how you're going to do it when they're out and about but you can't do anything right because they're in public and the snail house that's like an idea of how we create shapes like general level shapes and we found out that the snail house shape is just super awesome for me can hit my levels yeah and then it just got us talking um we started like you know we actually started reflecting on what is it actually we do uh and i think that was just really really valuable so all this in mind i just yeah i want to promote this i think you should try it out it doesn't have to be a social approach it can be whatever you think could be interesting and try and apply it to your game and see what happens yes that's it thank you

all right i guess we have lots of time for questions i don't know um do you have any questions i'm not sure how this goes on yeah oh i think there's a mic up there if you want to go to the mic sorry i was supposed to say that do you want to start already uh uh yeah um because you used larger public spaces in hitman 2 did you notice during play testing that people explored more options within the level sooner because they started in a more safe and low stress environment yes yes it could also be overwhelming because i was saying that we had a new problem all of a sudden that we hadn't thought of it was a little bit overwhelming for players

so we had to find ways to kind of quickly give them something they could go with and then say okay for the more seasoned players we're not gonna run over to that guy with the exclamation mark over his head they can just keep going and keep discovering cool stuff but we had a new uh challenge all of a sudden yeah all right thank you i wonder if you could elaborate on the snail house bullet point is that like where the the layers kind of begin to i saw in sapienza kind of goes in a half circle of sorts yes yeah yeah i think um it's about um it's easier for people to navigate in them when we did the this this analysis biande from the company was also a level designer he sort of joined in we started looking at season and season two and he realized at a point that our levels in hitman 1 was either like either they were um like flat or they were like

horizontal like we have like a paris as horizontal and we have bangkok this horizontal and then we have these other shapes where it seems to be a little bit of skew and it helps players navigate it's easy to figure out where you are basically and there's also something about that we create a path right of infiltration and then we allow you to kind of we talk a lot about swiss cheese at i o as well that you constantly need to have a way out we hate um dead ends dead ends is forbidden so i guess it's the same in in other games as well so yeah so it's basically about giving you a path but allowing you to kind of learn these little other ways in and then the other fortress at the end right so it also depends on what kind of level you're making but we will often have a fortress in our levels did that answer everything yeah totally okay cool uh yeah yeah uh so it appears that the level designs are very much geared towards the actual

primary targets um was there any ahead of time consideration for the elusive targets or kind of escalation missions where targets are all over the place yeah yes so when we're designing these that's a really good question when we're designing these levels we're trying we're constantly trying to keep in mind that these are supposed to keep on living right um that we have lots of content that we want to keep adding um so yes definitely that that goes into it and often if we have an idea for something where we go oh this doesn't really fit here but maybe we can use this in the future for an elusive or for a bonus mission or something like that yeah we try to to keep that in mind there's lots of stuff you have to design at the same time and sometimes it feels completely impossible but it's a but like creating these huge levels like mumbai like where you just have tons of of uh real estate like you just have like a lot of slum and lots of places and yeah definitely that's we tried to do that yeah thanks yes

hi hi so um i know that your goal is to make like these realistic environments to portray everyday life and a lot of the levels are based on actual real-life cities and places how strict are you with trying to portray that city exactly how it is versus um adding in fictional areas or fictional events things like that yes that's a really good question i think i'm actually supposed to repeat the questions uh so it's so this is about like how detailed do we go in recreating levels and trying to make them real um we i think we have like this mantra that we're not trying to create real uh levels we're trying to create believable levels and i think that's very important um for this also to be fun because it's also pretty you know it's it's basically it's a hitman game right you don't want to go too real uh because then it's not fun anymore and then like we want to

keep that um sort of stylized aspect on those things we try to just draw like take a lot of inspiration from these places um but like a level like sapienza there is a town that looks a lot like sapien so i can't remember what it's called um but you can you can go visit that place uh and some of it at iowa actually have um so i mean we yeah we draw inspiration from it um and we go visit the places like for a season for hitman 2 people actually went to these places to kind of get that feel how does a slum in mumbai actually feel and took tons of pictures and stuff but we have to make our own version of it of course did that answer the question yes thank you hello hello i'm sorry oh are we doing the back and forth thing i don't know who came first okay okay um yeah thank you for the talk i just had a question on

sort of streaming in the way that you actually put your levels together at i o because the levels are so dense um is that something that happens automatically or like when you're indoors you're kind of you know chunking out big parts of outside have you got big level streaming volumes around the whole area or what do you mean exactly sorry just uh level streaming because it all happened automatically or are you kind of turning off big sections um no it's a it's everything is just uh i actually i'm actually not completely sure do you mean like uh you mean like for the player not when we're working in the editor i'm assuming um well yeah sort of sort of the development part of it actually so harder level designers doing you know setting down level streaming volumes or do you just make the levels and and that's that um i'm a little bit unsure uh what you mean like as in like when we when we design them from the get-go like how

we if we design everything at the same time or if we like go like from this area and then out or do you mean uh just the the technical side of it so if you're inside a building ah okay like it's outside yeah yeah yeah so we define we divide things into rooms that's what we call it yeah sorry it's just the terminology yes so everything is uh it's made in rooms and then we have gates between those rooms right so we try to not show as much as possible and then for some of these levels that was a huge limit and for instance in miami right you can't go and see the whole level at the same time right we try to make sure that we put things in the middle and we divide it and make sure you have these super nice vistas but we can't show you everything at the same time so yeah i mean yeah that's a big part of it but it's something that that sort of happens as you're designing it and we have uh we have people in the team that are worried about that stuff super early and

like oh this is way too much like we have to just chill back and yeah okay thank you hello oh sorry sorry i'm completely uh forgetting this guy sorry over here yeah great talk by the way thank you um so i'm curious if during the development process you categorize players based on their play styles yes and based on that how do you balance out the opportunities that you design yes it's an excellent question so this is about how we design for different play styles um well we need a sneak path always right we need to make sure that you can we need to make sure you can do it suit only in silent assassin and all these things like we meet we need to make sure that that's doable when we make them um and uh when we do like social stealth there are different types of um players like we have the um the center stage social still like

helmut krueger in paris i don't know if you played but like where you're basically in the spotlight you're the main character like walking out there and you know if you're a real hitman you'll be going maybe that's not the place you want to be like everyone can kind of see you but but but it's awesome to have those experiences and it makes you feel like you really cheated everyone like they think i'm actually the main attraction of this thing right um so we try to do that and we try to do these more like you're doing social stealth but you're more like sneaking you know you're the janitor like you're you and we make sure that you have sniping opportunities and all this stuff yeah we we try uh to to design these different paths but players can just come like they find a way like you know sometimes you just go they did what you know like how is that even possible so um i'm not there's some players who are like we're not too worried they're gonna find a way um they always do so but yeah yes we try

as much as we can sorry then back here so it sounds like a super intuitive and really useful rule set of philosophy rather um and i'm a big fan of rules for making levels it makes life a lot more simple but is there a danger that it becomes potentially formulaic or like can do can you break those your own rules yeah you disrupt the system that you've basically established now yeah yeah yeah yes yeah and i want to say these are like these aren't rules for how like um we may want to make another colorado yeah right because because i think colorado had some super interesting things and i think we just learned so much in doing this that we know the the pitfalls so we can do another colorado now and and make sure that the players have those same opportunities so definitely yeah i don't think this should stop anyone and ns was also said before like did did any issues come with actually

following these rules and they did right like we did this and we're like oh okay right we need to make sure that they're not overwhelmed by public space right so uh so yes definitely yeah it's cool hi um i was kind of curious if there were any issues regarding um player retention or hidden challenges uh specifically regarding the proportionality of the particular zones especially regarding like the public zones like if players would get uh less engaged if they were just walking around too much without any necessary challenges yeah yeah definitely i think it's like again you need to make sure it's varied so i think the reason why big public spaces work is because they're varied that they change if it was just the same same same stuff like it was just just a huge park and there's two mansions on either side that would be super boring right so i think it's about keeping the player engaged and i think it's just what we learned was that you can keep the player engaged without introducing trespassing

um that they'll still that part of their brain is still going like what should i do here who's allowed here who are these people what's going on like yeah yeah definitely i think so yeah hello and thank you for the talk so in a previous talk you guys spoke about how you went through the process of creating a tutorial for the stages and how difficult it was for the players to figure out what's what all the actions in the in the stage are now before you spoke about the swiss cheese approach to getting yourself in trouble but being able to come out of it yeah relatively easily so could you tell us a little bit about how you modulate the player motivation to fail and think of something else to try again and keep going through that process even though there's very hard stops yeah in those paths that's an excellent question so it's about how

when you do trial and error in the level how do you make sure that the player keeps can get out of trouble and can can keep keep going basically right yeah um i mean this is kind of a little bit more over in the game design department because this is about systems right when do we cool down the level and say okay everyone's forgotten that guy got an axe in his head we're fine now you know back to work and that can get a little weird but we try like i mentioned like having lots of these making sure that you have these safe spaces like making sure you have spaces that have that are not filled with rules and expectations or npcs making sure you have places that are just like hallways with not that many people or you know so you can you can get away and um and sort of feel like you're going from one social context and moving away from it and maybe getting into an entirely new one because then it's okay that they don't know

about x as a guy so you know it's it's a i think in the level design that's what we can do but i think it's um [Music] there's no perfect like there's no like this is a way to do it and i think it's something that we keep like we need to keep getting better at because i think it's a really important thing yeah thank you yeah yeah uh with the addition of multiplayer and hitman 2 uh how does that affect uh how you design the levels with like the public spaces so you're thinking ghost mode yeah ghost ghost mode yeah um so that's a tricky question because yeah oh that's really hard question i'm not sure i'm the right person to answer that question because i haven't worked on ghost mode but i would think that it's okay so what's really tricky about ghost mode is that um the game tension

kind of stays even though you're playing again right uh so that's like one of the challenges we're facing is that if we do the x head scenario again right some like in a big public space with a lot of people um and you know lockdown has happened right um i think that's something that we need that especially when we design gross mode that we need to be mindful of that it's not that the area isn't entirely ruined um because there's so many people who saw you do something bad and now when you're playing it again so yeah i think it's uh you know when we design the levels we need to of course worry about the main missions and we need to think about elusives and other stuff and now we also have to think about ghosts it's a it's a lot um so yeah i think it's about that making sure that you don't have like two large uh open spaces with a million people in it because that's going to feel weird in ghost mode yeah hiya

because your level design and locales are so inspired are there any settings that you really want to incorporate into a future hitman game or do you feel like you've already made your dream level with one of the previous settings oh i'm working on my dream level right now and i can't talk about it so i'm sorry i look forward to playing it cool thank you hi so my question is about uh when you create a level which has such a large amount of content such a large amount of different things you can do different things going on different things happening different ways of entering different missions and there's so much variety and so much there how do you encourage a player to actually explore that as opposed to go down the path of least resistance and find just quickly how do i get to my

target as fast as possible yeah and then a second follow-up question to that is have you ever thought about or i mean obviously you have but what are your thoughts about sort of reusing levels to sort of encourage getting them to getting a player to discover more about a level so that way they can actually use more of what they've previously learned okay so this is a good question it's about replay and how do you make people explore and not just go down the beaten path um so we have challenges i think challenges is an excellent tool for like highlighting some of these things that we put in the level that we really hope that someone will see um but i will say i i like that there are these little pockets that you may not notice until like the 10th time you play a level like there's still parts of some levels that i have i haven't seen and i get surprised when i see it and i think that's an act like a really cool experience um but yeah we have challenges the challenge system and we have these opportunities like our quest system where we can take them to some of these

cool areas that they may not necessarily see from the get-go and the other question was yeah making sure like highlighting areas for bonus missions and elusive targets i think it's an excellent opportunity for us to to do that um and i think that kind of answered the first question in a way um yeah because i think there's like if you played some of the bonus missions like for instance in sapienza there's like three bonus missions in that level and and each are like very different i feel and they highlight other like really nice areas of that level so yeah we we try to do that uh as much as possible thank you oh yeah they were first versed you had um all these great different space terminologies and you work together with the environment artists about how to set those up but was there any sort of environment or ld make any visual indications as to the

different space types so like was there different lighting for the privates there versus the public spaces and what did that continue through different levels right um though it really depends on the level right um i mean we try um to to use these visual cues like that could be just um having um things that aren't very presentable like you know like bags of trash or something like that it could be like stuff like that or here they just put up some chairs for later like full of chairs or i think like we try to do these little things to make sure it very quickly feels like oh okay i'm not allowed to be here this is a backstage area or or whatever yeah and then like we had all the different spaces and then a lot of the layouts that you showed had the public spaces sort of intruding on or sort of wrapping together with the private spaces is there some sort of like percentage or anything that you followed how much public space needed to like

touch the the private space um well this is your chance to have the player see your private space right this is this is where you get to to really show them this is where you want to go and this is how you can get there so don't think it's about how much but i think it's about how clearly you do it and how you show who's allowed there in hitman that's a huge part of it right the disguises so you have a chance to see behind the fence that it's like ships walking around there or whatever backstage people right yeah for implementing the stuff you talked about in other games or other types of games do you have any ideas or recommendations for um places that might not fit what most people understand about like the people that work there where it's like

i am seeing someone do something and i want to either become that person or do what they're doing but i have no idea what they are doing like in it's hard to think of many examples other than fantasy but where we as normal people don't always have the ideas of what is expected of a person in that area right right so you're thinking like if we go to like more exclusive exotic places where you don't know what what are they actually doing like what's there what's their job or whatever yeah yeah um yeah i mean that's a challenge i think that's a if that's the question you're asking like how we deal with it or yeah um so i think it's about like even if you're at the super exclusive weird place like a i'll have a scale where it's like everything is over the top right and

people are wearing robes and stuff like that you still have waders you know you still have kitchens you still have bathrooms they need to be like you know you have all these things um that's going to be there because you're humans um that you can just play on from there or you you use like i mentioned like examples from movies and other games and fiction um so people can go like oh you know he's a cryogenics guy or whatever like a or a detective you know it's um then you try and play on on those stereotypes kind of yeah yeah but it is it is super difficult or you can um like again then you have to invent something new but then you have to tab into other uh you know design tricks like um everyone has a different color or something and everyone who wears yellow will do this thing like in it it's a yeah it's super difficult when we do that when we go out and and explore those areas but i think it's doable it's just

making sure it's it's readable for the player thank you how long do we have left are we done or four minutes four minutes okay cool yeah all right i have a question actually about uh the integration of your design and art teams with as richly detailed environments as you have in hitman and is how intrinsically linked gameplay very closely yeah we uh we spend all our time together yeah um like the level designers and environment artists our buddies like we we we're partners in crime we try to do everything together and make sure we're aligned have our desks right up against each other and eat together and smell each other and everything i think that's super important like that

the problem as a level designer i think i was always i want my like every someone from uh the whole company from each team represented you just sit around me in a ring so i can just like a writer and an animator like because you need to talk to all of them all the time yeah all the time but the environment artist is your is the most important person for you yeah all right thank you hello hello um i have a question for the design of hitman you have like so much possibilities and solutions to the level um even the system you can have make many actions to solve a single problem yeah um i was wondering how do you mitigate that at a as a level designer as you have your players so much possibility um do you do some kind of some kind of technique in order to make it intentional so how do we decide like when the level is done you mean like how do we show the player or as we're designing or

what do you mean like when you're designing uh you have a system and a level that has like so many solutions okay like that yeah um yeah that's tricky i think there's like many different ways of doing it of trying to show you uh how this works um like there's a one example i don't know if it completely answers your question but there was one i thought it was a little funny where riding also helped us out a little bit that's a place in paris where you walk like you have you can just walk right into the building and if you walk to the left and this is backstage area and this is a chef who's like wants to go in and the guard is like listen buddy you don't have to keep asking me this question you're allowed here and you're allowed all the way up to the second floor and you can just walk right in like and i was just listening to that i'm like all right like fair enough like um so you know we we do all kinds of little things sometimes it's not that much on

the nose but it's uh but yeah but it is super hard to communicate like what can you do here and as you're saying there is a system there's all these things and the minute you uh knock out someone in front of everyone then the ai takes over and it's anyone's guess what's going to happen now right so what we're trying to cater for all of it and it's a it's a crazy job it's so much fun but it's a crazy job yeah did that answer your question sort of okay we can talk after this yeah okay yeah thank you and you're left yeah hello hi hi uh so i like to ask because there's a lot of maps in the game so area maps are like really different so how do you guys decide on what kind of map to use like do you think about like assets reusable assets or like you recreate every single like different assets for different maps um oh that depends on a lot of things um like we try to make them as different as possible in general and that's just expensive to do but we try to do that because i think it's important that they

feel different uh we don't like reusing sometimes you have to uh if you're time pressured or anything like that or if it's just like okay we don't need a million different toilets like we can maybe use a few toilets like no one's gonna notice um like it can get a little insane once in a while but um but i think it's super important to make them feel very different but and we we do lots of lots of things to make sure it feels different like yeah like sound and lighting and all this stuff making sure that the time of day is different and the mood of the level is different um and how they look and how they act and how they talk like there's so many aspects to making sure they feel buried but it but i think it's very very important that they feel different yeah all right thank you very much i think you're you're off and oh we're done can i one last question or square oh we're done oh we gotta go okay well boots hog after this okay yeah cool