Level Design in a Day: A Series of First Steps - Overcoming the Digital Blank Page

[Music] hi everybody sorry about that so I'm Seth marinelle's Corey said this is my third year getting to speak at level design a day and I didn't necessarily intend on being the first presentation when I came up with my title but it seems to have worked out really well so today we're gonna be talking about a series of first steps specifically were only looking at strategies for sort of capturing your initial design and coming up with something that you can take back to your team and turn into a great piece of content so we've been looking at sort of like everything from conception through sort of the Bloch world in phase or I would say all right we've got a design we've got something that we can move forward with and now the idea for this presentation came from when we started doing the book project I went back and started looking through our previous slides and looking at some of the stuff that did in 2012 and I saw this slide in there and you can see that you know my main thing I was talking about was this

dominant feature having a central theme or idea that ties all the details of your content together and I sort of said well you know after you're done with that well just block out the level around these objectives right it's just because that's easy right and I started rosing you know I haven't talked about some of this stuff before like we just sort of skip over the beginning part and we talked about these high level concepts of how we make good content but how do you even get started and building anything right anyone that's been involved in a creative process of whatever you've dealt with this or a blank page syndrome where you have some days where you sit down you're like I know what I want to build this is gonna be great right and you just you just go and those are the times when you know you don't need to follow some sort of crazy process but there's the other days where you're like you know it'd be great if I could get anything on the screen even if it's just some kind of like random boxes right I just want to get something up and feel like I've got some momentum so we're gonna be specifically sort of looking at you know those days where you don't have for emotion of what you're trying to do whoa how do you get started right I think

that if we're trying to create something and you're not sure how to begin you need to define clearly what it is you're trying to build what success going to look like where are we trying to go specifically the first thing we want to look at is what's your primary constraint right if you're trying to build a single-player game what we're making a dead space title or something like that ultimately you're responsible for producing a certain amount of you know duration of the main campaign right you need an hour worth of good content that's coming here and this is sort of the primary thing that's going to drive you forward if you have a more narrative driven game it could be that's like we have two characters and we have to get them together and and this is the main point point of this if it's 20 minutes it's a half an hour it doesn't matter as long as we deliver on this narrative moment you're making a multiplayer map it's like you have to have 64 players in this multiplayer map and that's going to determine a lot of things about the size of the space the number of capture points and how much you can do with art right so there's always going to be kind of this short straw and that's the thing

that's kind of determined a lot of the decisions you're gonna make down the line so if you can identify that upfront it's it hopes build sort of this constraint box that you can work within and then create from there another thing that you can do is look at like what are the things that every level is gonna have in this game right if you're making a Mario level a doom level a dead space level whatever you're gonna probably have something like a start point and end point some enemies some pickups like what are the basic building blocks of your game that appear in 80% of all of your levels and you've got this you're right well these are the things that have to be that right so if I don't know other things like we start figuring out well you know where I'm gonna put my suit store or my upgrade bench or my kiosk right we have general plans in our phase definitions that explicitly say like hey is the LD sat down and thought about like Walker locations pick up locations and things that are paced out through you know interspersed with the combat and the other events so these are some of the things that I just pulled out of some of our random documents for

Dead Space 3 this is the stuff we've explicitly listed out you have to do this every single time you're building a level but the first time you're working on something on a project it's it's good to have this written down right these are like these are the elements that I have to mix in along with everything else since we've got this right we've kind of got a general idea of what is it that I need to build but then how do I start building it right well step1 for building something is to capture the intent or capture your design right and what do I mean by this I think that there are three main components to delivering a design if we're talking about making like a single player level you've got a concept which is just this high level sort of X statement thing or your dominant feature or whatever it's gonna be you've got a walkthrough which is a description of what you want to build and it doesn't have to literally be a walkthrough if you're making a multiplayer map or something but it's a plan of well what's the setting of the map what are the different sort of points gonna be how is everything gonna work together and what's the content gonna really

entail and we'll go through each one of these sort of imagery and finally there's a block world all of this is the design and that's the deliverable that we're trying to get to at the end of this you want to have a thing that you're like I'm a level designer and I've produced this thing and this is what we're gonna go forward and build it may not be the final design but it is a design and the point from which you can watch forward so going through each one of these individually concept this is that in some way the simplest because it's just like well this is the this is the main idea or the main thread that I'm trying to take through it but it's also one of the hardest things to kind of walk down in my 2012 talk I was talking almost exclusively about coming up with a central concept and I said said you know sometimes we look at a level you wanna be able to say well this is the you know this is the underwater level or this is the the nighttime stealth level or this is like the at sea level something that that's the central element to the art into the gameplay into the story that's gonna pull it all together an example that I wasn't able

to use because we hadn't announced that we were doing Dead Space 3 at the time but was like sitting in the front of my mind was a level I was working on called the command ship so I had this idea that it was the whole idea was that you're awakening the sleeping ship is the first time that anyone's been on this this this abandoned ship in 200 years and everything in it was like all that handles you had to manually operate there was dust there's Necromorphs that I hate sort of hanging and cocoons that we hadn't done previously in the game just to sell this idea that there's kind of like this laying evil and you're showing up and kind of like kicking back to life right and that culminates in in your sort of final like generator encounter and all this stuff tied into this central idea and now the you know this isn't something there's pops into your mind of though out of nowhere like we had this whole sort of underlying threat of kind of amount of madness Cthulhu stuff going on really early in Dead Space 3 so that's sort of where this idea evolved out of but you can't just assume that you're gonna come up with your concept out of the blue right

you have to brainstorm find find of references talk to other people the amount of time that I spend just grabbing other designers and being like hey so I need to talk to you about this thing like and it's just like what if we did blah blah blah blah blah right and we'll throw a bunch of ideas up on a board and I have just folders and folders of random machines and things like that that I found on Google Image Search and tumblr I have no idea how people I guess you just looked through books or whatever and add the little sticky notes to them in the in these the olden days but you have all these things that are gonna inspire you and you put together and you've been trying to find threads that connect these different things that are exciting and from there your concept can grow I want to take it in this direction and then you sift through that stuff and the stuff that really resonates where the concept that you're trying to make you distill down into a walk through and know what form it takes it is to depend on what kind of content you're trying to make what kind of game you're trying to build but I

think that there's some core things that your walkthrough needs to answer right you need to have what are your major objectives what are the major things that the players doing what are the major beats so what kind of things are we highlighting in the level and these things are gonna determine the scope of the level if you're gonna get an idea of how many you know custom gameplay scenarios do I need do I need custom texture stats and things like that this is the first time where we can start evaluating like well what is it that you're really asking to build but it can be kind of hard to parse all this information out of you know 20 pages of me rambling about all these like scary corridors and stuff like that so it's really important to include a top-down map in your walkthrough of whatever you're trying to build because this condenses this whole scope concept down into one thing that you can look at and it really captures the flow over the level you can look at look at it with your eye and trace how the player is gonna be moving through the space and and even start to evaluate things like well maybe I need some more more space in between you know this beat

and that beat right like am I actually asking for the right amount of rooms and this is all great and you're really excited and you're like I've got this concept I've got this pile of you know fantastic reference and this checking all under perforce and you know who's gonna read it like you're gonna read it your producer is gonna read it you're gonna high-five all day about how awesome it is but half of the artists and they're working on your level aren't necessarily gonna see this so I think that there's one thing is that that is important is once you feel like you've got some momentum behind what you're building is to take it and we do these boards where we'll get some key arts some key images we'll have a story summary you know the top down map and then because in DES bass are really worried about the lighting and the tone is you're progressing to the level a color script of kind of like how we're gonna make things so if we have a major state change like in command ship we turn on the power the second half is going to have a different feel and that's mentioned in your walkthrough and it's captured here so that you know

you've got a hundred person team they can all look at it now if you're on a five person team it's easy for you to just sit down and talk about these things right but if you've got someone that's building a desk for your you know your Admirals quarters or something like that you want them to be able to kind of get a general feel for what you're trying to put forth as a designer right you know at this point we've got this pretty bored with all this stuff it's like well our design is done right and it's it's interesting because I was talking to our read well designer from dead space 3 about this presentation I'm like yeah yeah and we've done this thing early on where we were like we're gonna plan out the whole game what the general high-level beats are and we're gonna write really short you know like a couple paragraph walkthroughs of what each level is going to contain and then gave them out to the designers and they would finish through the walkthrough and get would get approved and then they would start building the block worlds and the approved walkthrough that everyone had agreed yeah this is what we're building would differ insanely from the block world that would come back and you know once we had the

block world approved the level didn't change that much we're like okay we know where it's going on but it was obvious that there was major questions that weren't being answered by the earlier part of a process that needed to be sort of worked out in the block world and the things that I think that we were missing so far in our process are we hadn't captured the looking field space like you've got you've got concept art and reference and things like that but you don't know what it feels like to actually be there on the controller standing in the space and thinking about well you know how big is this room how is the ceiling what are the sight lines right between this moment in that moment am I gonna have a thing and I top-down map if you're not necessarily thinking of well I'm coming into the room and I've got the door that I need to go to and it's on the left hand side of the room and my top-down map and you get there in the controller and you realize that we're a third person game with a character on the left hand side of the screen and character covers the place that you're trying to go right you have to think about these things the other thing is you you've already got all the

beats and you know what the player flow is gonna be but how did they connect right in the first chapter of this ps3 we had a moment where Isaac meets danik the bad guy up on this balcony right and you've moved to the whole level in the continuous space we haven't really had an opportunity to like teleport the player and move them anywhere and then Isaac falls off of this ledge and lands in this alley and has this whole encounter and a top-down map it makes a certain degree of sense but when you're sitting down and actually trying to build it in 3d it's like do I actually have enough rooms to get me from like the public sector to here is about knie gonna make sense do I have a doorway that kind of opens into nothingness like does this space actually work and that's what building your block world is gonna do so now I guess the big thing is we got to build a block world step one is you sit down aters and make some boxes at least this is sort of the strategy that I employ start off get sort of some kind of central point that you're gonna go from and then I kind of grow the level from

there an example another one from dead space 3 is the research ship so this was my initial walkthrough a top-down map for level and you'll see that there's this room in the middle of it called the connecting hallway upper and there's actually there's a lower part but this is because later I had to cut it into two things because they initially was like hallways are easy right I'm just gonna put in a hallway and that'll be a point and I'll just start growing it from there and I start looking at it I'm like well but I want to have a window over here so that it connects the outside to the inside of the ship because we could go in the exterior I never built something like that before and then I'm like I need it I want a pillar because I want pillars and ducts in this level and I'm defining what the look and the feel is and the room started to grow and from there I was like well okay well now I know what this hallway that's connected to this thing is gonna look like and the whole level kind of grew out of this this one central point and if you open up the most maps that have worked on and you find the room that's at zero zero and Maya that's probably the first thing I started with and sometimes it ends up being a really big room other times it's

like like a dead end hallway and it just grew from there and you know I was wondering like am I crazy is this is this kind of am I the only one that does this and there's this interesting article online by David Johnston who worked on D dust and it's it's a fascinating read actually because he's basically had this screen shot and one other screenshot from the early Team Fortress 2 version that valve and took canning and he saw this and was like I see these these you know these elements I like these arches I like these these textures and he was like I wonder if I could do this in counter-strike and he basically built this room and and from that room that be ended up being the very bottom of this map which is the CT spawn point and the rest of the map he was just sort of filling in and it's interesting as he's going he's talking about how he tried adding in an underground section but it didn't feel like right because it didn't have a lot of the architectural elements and the general vibe that the initial room did and he ended up pulling it out and when

you've got something like that you've got a piece where you're like okay this is capturing kind of the vision and the feel of the space that I want that you can then judge other bits of content then you know you've got it like you you're going forward but as I'm looking at this things sort of occurred to me of white blue there's definitely other people that do this but aren't I basically just advocating for following the world world craft tutorial like aren't I basically saying like stick a brush in the world hollow it out dump it an info player start and hope that you've configured all your pack files correctly and it's actually gonna build right hey have I really not changed the process in which I'm built you know in in the last like 15 years and I went through a serious crisis about this because I was like you know have I been sort of just like limited to thinking about things in terms of like brushes and boxes how how am I gonna break out of this right because like when we're doing the hands earlier is a lot of people now are you know you're either not making something that's like

I on a real tournament deathmatch level or like a half-life level or something like that or you're working in an indie space where you know you're using a completely different kind of tool set than we're using in triple-a so it's like how do we how do I kind of break out of this box right cuz I was looking at games that that I found interesting online and it's like well how am I gonna turn a box into Daisy or how am I gonna turn a box into you know a city in GTA 5 or how am I gonna turn a box into a level 4 cut the rope right like what is that what does all of this mean and so I called up our creative director from Dead Space 2 who had moved on and was working as Ingo for a while and I was like hey man so I'm working on this presentation about block welding and I'm worried that it might be like you know a little too locked in kind of like the work that you know that I've done what kind of traditional level design of this sort of thinking about interiors and not necessarily thinking about like an exterior space where you worried about the relationship of different points together but more like defining the whole of the level like how

am I going to generalize this it was like oh this basically I feel like I've been building kind of D&D dungeon maps the whole time right and like as soon as you get past the point where you're defining the edges of the dungeon what what are you going to do and so his I mean if your presentation is really just about white box hanging purely then I think you're talking you're talking about a very specific kind of game and a very specific kind of toolset so that's when I started to incorporate some more stuff about the general process and how we would integrate your design but I also realized that maybe I needed sort of like look at beyond just what I do sort of in my day-to-day process and I started asking people that work in other disciplines well you know how do you get started on doing design stuff because I realized you know maybe if I want to expand beyond this I needed to get a new strategy so I talked to some people to do like UX designers really interested in user stories and things like that for a little while and I started reading a bunch of like I do papers and going crazy on design thinking for like about

two weeks and then I was like um I don't know this this might be getting a little far off pace it's maybe getting a little generalized right because this is a level design talk and as a level designer you're often not creating the interface that that you're using you're you don't create the controls you don't create how a lot of things feel so there's a lot of really interesting stuff there and I think that's a whole nother talk basically I was just getting too far away from block folding but one thing I did find interesting was I just talked to my friend who's an architect in New York and she does like condos and retail spaces and things like that I was like well how do you get started and she said well she makes a few bubble diagrams and you know I was I was interested in how focused she was on what the the human or the user or the player was going to be doing at the time but also just how they're thinking of well how would these spaces relate to each other on what does it imply and so I was looking at some bubble diagrams and some of them are very blueprint like but other ones are kind of abstract and

I think I think that's that's interesting about this is you can have a room that's got a kitchen a dining room and a living room all in the same space and there's no walls separating right but they'll have separate bubbles because the bubbles are representing the function or the intent or the purpose of a space and you're thinking about how these are relate to each other and how that how they connect and this is sort of abstracting out you know things to a certain degree and I was like oh this is really interesting its spatial and maybe this could go somewhere at the same time I I did the global Game Jam and I'm building this this game in unity and of course I'm doing sort of the level content we're building this joust like game right so it's a single screen thing and I have this this terrible little drawing that was in my notebook of like my first version of like well what's our level gonna be and I remember that my think was well I don't want it to feel like you know Mario Brothers arcade where it's just a bunch of boxes I wanted to feel like there's unique areas and unique spaces and if I go to like this corner I'm like ah yeah I like this place and as I'm doing it I've been

thinking about bubble diagrams I start realizing that I'm like oh well in this corner I'm gonna have like a little diamond cave and I want to have a like a nice little narrow thing in here and a little something you can fall down and I'm just thinking about these unique areas that are sort of like bubbles of purpose or bubbles of function and the main thing that I'm doing as a level designer in this this action is how did these things flow how do they connect together and you know I had this initial version of it and you can see that I sort of expanded a few things move some things around I move my little diamond cave down at the bottom but then in the final version a lot of this or those those core elements were there right and I even if I look at this I just see like there's a central conflict point there's some side areas where you can have pickups and things like that and by creating these pockets of interest we've kind of generalized the way that you're thinking about space and function and you can use this for a single screen game or if you were building like a city and you want have different regions and then how you flow between them and when these things become accessible I think that if you look at like designing a world in

Metroid designing like a multiplayer for free shooter battle level or whatever everything will work but at the same time you don't want to make everything too complexion I want to make everything unique right you want to make sure that each area has a purpose and the player should have options and that's why thinking about the flow between them is so important because you need to have options but it can't be like you come into a room and it's 360 degrees and every single thing as a door right because then the players decision is just like well I don't know it's a crapshoot really complex maps are hard to learn this is something I learned really early on I was really obsessed with like the crazy counter-strike maps where there's like a million ways to flank they flank and vents and all that kind of stuff and no one plays those everyone plays dust in office right and it's because it's an easy thing to learn and you kind of have a meta game of what we go down this route or we go down this route right and if you go one way five times and then you go the other way once right and it becomes interesting and single-player Maps

you know if you get too confusing the player kind of loses sight of what it is that they're trying to do I I found this as I was digging through some architecture stuff as well and I think this quote is kind of interesting because it ties in the idea that you're always thinking of things in the next larger context I think that thinking of these bubbles of function when you're planning out things really sort of enables this and it also it ties in a lot with what I'd been talking about in my building university of details talk of having this kind of mosaic of narrative of how there's a story to each fight each room each level each game and everything sort of fits within each other and from there I think that you know you can you can come up with a design and you can vet it at each phase and make sure that you've got something but once you've got that thing it's like oh is this design good right at a certain point you have to be you got to sit down and evaluate we've got all these things and is this is this what we want to do is this where we want to grow from I think that an important thing to

keep in mind as you're going through all of this is that at any point you need to be willing to go to step one if things aren't working we should throw everything or anything away right you know necessarily have to get rid of everything but I used to be a computer engineer and one of the things that one of my professors an undergrad taught us was that you know you write a function you run this function you're having problems all the time it's like your Center it's it's really complicated and hard to do and it's where all your bugs are coming from right and your people are often scared to tackle that kind of stuff but do you have a part of your design or your level is just it's just not working you got to be willing to kind of throw it away because you've learned something right you've learned why it's not working and once you've identified that problem redoing again is probably only gonna take like 10% of the time it did the first time and what you've got is going to be sort of leaner and cleaner and better as you ultimately what we're trying to do you know is create a finished product and if you're pouring like metal or plaster into a mold or something like that you're gonna

have this little thing called sprue which is like the avenue which you're pouring the plaster into the mold you have to cut off a little like nub at the end right and sometimes that's your initial design it's something that you needed to in order to get it done but you just have to to cut it I've had so many times where I've built a room like this room was one of the ones I didn't deadspace to and like you can't see the exit the enemies make no sense and I had this like nonsensical ramp that goes down I'm like just to go back up again and whenever I start doing that I'm like oh I'm just trying to arbitrarily change the heights of the floors to make it more interesting but then you sit down you kind of come up with you know some central idea like you know having a window separating you from what's going on and this this this room right here you can see ended up becoming this in the final game and those because the block world captured enough of what I was sort of trying to do that we were able to go forward is ultimately that's what we're trying to do here we're trying to get a foothold we're trying to take that first step to climb up this

mountain of production and it's only then that we're ready to move on to step 2 at last which is to take that design and iterate upon it and that's what Joel is going to talk about in a little bit so I'm Seth you can find me on Twitter at Seth Maranello or email me at Seth adulterer dreams net and interested in whatever questions so if you guys have questions for Seth you can go up to these microphones here here here and over there and we have a few minutes what was the name of your game jam game the name of my game jam game was wizard wizards that there was there originally

we're supposed to be Wizards but they ended up being dragons but you know you can't you can't change things when you got 48 hours and it was just it was like it was a multiplayer kind of joust like game and you had magical powers that you could pick up different little hats I don't know I was really excited about having a wizard tower speaking of not being able to change things when's the line drawn to compromise where you can no longer change the level it needs to be pushed off to the next step I mean in an ideal world never but obviously not I mean that's that's one of the reasons why I'm emphasizing and so what I in the talk I'm advocating for including the block world as part of the initial design phase and I think a lot of the time you would you know if someone was scheduling things out they'd be like well they wrote a walkthrough

and we have key art and we've got a concept right this littles done checkmark right let's just ship it off and build it and I really think that you need a playable block world that you can at least run around in before you can say with any degree of confidence like I have a design that we could ship and build so I mean that's the point where I'd say major changes to the level like I'm gonna you know completely alter the flow is probably becomes out of the question once everyone's agreed that they've got a functional block world but I think that that gives you a good point to say you know all right everyone agrees that this is where we're gonna go you go into a little bit of detail about starting like your eighth or ninth map like once you've actually gone through a bunch of them and you feel like you've run your course you're not sure where to go next like now this is a brand new blank page I mean every I find that everyone is

sort of everyone is sort of unique particularly if you are if you're moving around games right if you're building like I'm building another dead space map there's a certain element of okay all right as I was talking about earlier like I know that there's sort of a pattern or rhythm to what you're gonna have the combat and things like that but there's just information that you're bringing in I think that every single every single level is sort of a unique thing and the only thing you do is get better with the tools over time and you become slightly more experienced like but normally I feel like you the skills you gain are things like when things were to start going wrong like you're working on an encounter and people are confused about where things are you know where the enemies are coming from stuff like that those are the kind of problems that I feel like I spend the most time solving and feel like I'm getting better at the beginning phase is it's sort of just unique to every every project when you're starting with a block world what kind of level of detail do you start with like do you place every like a block for every crate or do you just

kind of put a big block like this is just gonna be a pile of crates like what kind of level do you start with and that's why I included some of those those pictures of like what the sort of general finished block would be like so I'm not doing any texture or any detail or anything like that I mean I would say that until you have like a hallway or like a general room with nothing in it that that feels good like don't start adding anything to it like the smallest amount of detail possible to capture what you're trying to do is good unless you unless you're you know a good 3d artist right like I I don't sit there and I'll just ration Maya forever trying to make something look good so I don't even try did you find out at the end that even with the bubble diagram you started with the sensory bubble yes one bubble and then creates the bubble around because for example my my approach I'm kind of I don't have these and then creating from the one central room I have the one bubble and creating all the bubbles around did you end with

the same um well I think what you're describing is sort of in line with how I build a lot of levels and what I was talking about earlier sort of so starting from a central point and flowering out from that location I'm not necessarily sure that the way that I would build something would tie into the way that I'm thinking about sort of this bubble concept but I look at that as more of a way of encapsulating a bunch of function like this is a town in my open world map or this is an island and like asin's creed 4 or something like that and what you're thinking about is the relationship of that bubble to another bubble right how they connect how they flow or even if you're like if you're making a cut the rope level or something like that where you place the stars and where you place the you know your obstacles or whatever they kind of create these little relationships or spaces that there are going to define how the player thinks about that space and how they think about your piece of content and that's sort of what I'm what

I'm thinking at that particularly in the first few steps of building a level like this you ever get the level designers equivalent of writer's block and how do you deal with it if you do yeah I mean that's sort of what I was I was I was getting at at the beginning of the talk about you know if you you really don't know what you do you sit down and define well what is it that this what does this content have to accomplish in order to be a success and what are the basic elements that there's no way we're shipping this without getting you know as I was sort of talking about if you if I know that I have to have a room that has a suit kiosk in it like maybe I just start building that room and and fitting it into the thing just so I feel like I've got some sort of momentum but again it differs from like level level I've had times before where I've like gone back and just started like doing top-down Maps in some like ancient game just to kind of get a feel for what I want to do and not even think about what

it looks like well I have seen there is for game this day about the level design some designer planned to like trick trick player to go to like a detour or to the dead end when you decide is it is that half like a criteria of the decide that how long this world should hear about ham how long going down a dead-end should take no I mean if you want like the player to go to the the right way to go to the next level yeah but sometimes like you have to go to that way or maybe to the dead-end maybe to a detour how long for for one level should take like the spaceship that you have I mean this is gonna vary drastically depending

upon what kind of game you're trying to make right and even even in something like like a dead space it's not even necessarily that one level needs to be a certain amount of length but it's like what do what do we want the player to accomplish right if it's a simple side mission and all we're trying to do is you know I did one in Dead Space 3 where you're just trying to capture some some extra munitions supplies before the bad guys get them and it's an optional thing you know that's like a 15 minute level because what you're doing isn't that big you can tell that story pretty fast right I think that again it's whatever your primary constraint is that's going to determine the size and scope of your content ultimately so in dead space tapes off 10 narrative right and in a multiplayer map it would be the number of players or the game modes you want to support earlier you talked about beats yeah and linking of beats can you elaborate so it beats is one of those sort of weird words that I feel like although it generically refers to some

sort of event that's not just walking around but in in a level specifically those are often the objective points when I complete an objective and then I move forward or I have some sort of major notable encounter right so in in commandership you you you enter the ship so that's that's a beat basically coming into the ship entering into the space and there's a scene and then you receive an objective which is you know go find someone right and the time in between there and that next beat which is finding this person you're looking for that's filled in with a bunch of gameplay but kind of how those things connect and beats that are really next but close to each other or where you get in these sort of like tricky situations look like so beats of verbs yes pretty much okay yeah so I was wondering yeah the parallels between level design and architectural design and really interesting and I was wondering if your architecture friend is able to shed some

light on kind of like the psychology of space and volume and how much that that comes into play early I think it's there's a huge overlap in terms of like the science of it or like the psychology of it but in terms of like the prac the practical application of like architectural the games are this weird pseudo reality right where everything is like extra big and the the way that everything flows together is just very different like you when you look this room right here wouldn't be unusual in a game but in real life it's like this room is giant right and and so sorting that out I think is is is the hardest thing for someone that's coming from architecture to put in but the idea of basic forms and how you break up space and how you separate things things like pillars and architectural supports are super important and like looking through architecture books is like the best how

do you balance this process with the level artist who's probably equally excited about making vistas and big rooms and things like that and ensuring that both of you come together to create a really coherent design could you repeat that sorry was that not coming out very clearly I'm sorry how do you in your level artists work together through this process because they've probably got their own aspirations about what they want to achieve during that you've both come together to create something that's really coherent and therefore successful yeah I mean for me the ideal situation would be that after I've got maybe a really really rough walk world done in that I then proceed and work like walking like hand in hand with my environment artist for all that and as actually one of the things that I was talking about the brainstorming phase at that phase I'll pull in whoever's gonna be my environment artist my concept artist or whoever's the the writer for that area and just throw ideas around with them and get that stuff down right like a wad

of is gonna be dictated by the story and the gameplay but how the level really flows and how you add visual interest at that looking field stage I think it's really important to work with anyone that you can collaborate with do it basically when you're level design contains puzzles or puzzle elements how do you represent those in your block world it depends on how important I think it's going to be to the architecture and the flow of the level if it's a self-contained thing like something that I walk up and engage with and then I enter essentially another form of control and then I'm gonna pop out of it'll just be some debug text in a switch and like I need three by three meters over here probably for something if it's a large environmental puzzle you need to at least block it out in Maya or

something so you can slide the different elements that are gonna move around and be like see I'm gonna build a build this and it's gonna make some sort of sense because if you're you're betting your hero room on this you know fantastic contraption thing and you don't have it visually represented it's yeah but those are often treat as like its own project will be like we're gonna have an epic puzzle like at the end of the DES based three DLC we have this gigantic room that we basically did the whole thing and then separately or blocking that final like a boss puzzle room and that's generally how we'll do it and it'll have its own kind design Docs and all that okay when you try to decide the intent of the lab while you are designing you decided depending on the game features oh you decided that that the feeling you want the player to feel or some others and

you talked about that I mean in some ways this ties into the primary constraint but it also ties into what kind of game they're trying to make right if I'm building a level for like a braid or a portal or something like that that's mechanics driven like then the mechanic is going to be what drives a lot of the content and my you know my ex statement or my concept should be something about exploring the different permutations of that mechanic in in dead space we tend to we have got a few basic mechanics but they generally are featured in every level we may have a moment where we're like well we really want to focus on stasis or I really want to focus on TK but ultimately it's it's a narrative and experience driven game because the mechanics aren't what we're using to create kind of the mood and the atmosphere which is what a lot of the franchise is about how often do you have the situation where you're told your levels to massive or too much of a

strain on like system resources on that constraint system and have you avoid that and planning or deal with that pretty much all the time in the last in the last week our lead technical artist came up and is like really you want you want to do this rodeo shio again because I have a tendency like I'm relatively technical and I tend to be like nope we can do this this this this will be fine and then at the end of the day it's like yeah so I for that boss room at the end of the dead space awaking thing I was like I'm gonna make the biggest room that's ever been in a dead space game and I'm gonna include all these mechanics that I've personally never get to go out to put in a level somewhere and it was it was kind of a nightmare to ship but I mean that's the start that's the part that's fun though right like you you you ought to pick your battles though like when I'm doing something like that I'm intentionally being like all right this is gonna be a moment that I want people to remember and that I want to be like something that I'm like sort of proud

that I put together you don't want to like make hallways that randomly have like transparent glass in them all over the place Justin you know make your rendering engineer cry I had a question on you so on purpose of areas and your level yeah is it is it a good design principle to say to have just an area in your level we're just the only reason it's theirs for the player to explore and as no other purpose yeah look good I mean it's part of it's part of building out your world like it should have a purpose but it doesn't have to be a required alpha path gameplay purpose right like I it might have been last year or the year before at some point I talked about how somewhere in your game you need to have like one bathroom right like just to fill out the fact that you know these are people and and there's a bathroom somewhere right like those are the kind

of things that flush out whatever it is that you're trying to do and I think having you know having little nooks or dead ends that the player is going to discover and if they feel like they found something cool then it enhances their experience I mean I put as many like interesting little side passes I can get on the environment art budget thank you yeah my name is fine about always looking at a larger context yeah I was wondering what how big a role to other levels play in the design of your level when I'm working on something on a sort of a day to day basis not that much I mean unless I'm looking at well they've got a mechanic that I find really interesting like we had a decompression mechanic in Dead Space 2 which got repurposed for a million different things in other levels not always just

decompression so there's there's that element of it but that's actually one of the reasons why when we were doing ds3 we started out at the beginning trying to look at things from a very high level because we wanted to have this this experience where there was sort of more open or hub like moments followed by a more linear section bridging you to kind of another hub and at that point that dictated a lot because we had a vision for what the overall game flow was going to be and that dictated what the flow of the individual levels were in relation to the the other bits of content right I also just depends on how much your stuff flows together you know if you're making like a like Bioshock with one or something where you can actually move and backtrack a lot then it does matter a lot Thanks all right Thank You Seth that was great so we've got a 15 minute break and then Joel's talk how we shipped Skyrim and fallout 3 using

iterative level design except backwards that will be in 15 minutes so go hit the head grab a drink and come back 15 minutes we'll pick it up promptly thank you [Music]