Level Design Workshop: A Narrative Approach to Level Design

[Music] hello everybody hi uh so This Is A Narrative Approach to level design I just have a quick sound check [ __ ] all right good now we know our levels um anyway so This Is A Narrative Approach to level design um oh quick reminder cell phones off do your surveys uh highfive your casa uh Etc anyway Narrative Approach to level design uh has narrative did the en title it's definitely a level design talk I promise uh this is still a design talk uh but um the reason I'm doing a narrative Focus one is because levels and level design are how the players experience and interact with the game World um it's up to the level designer to decide how a story is unfolded to the player and if you've been at any of the level on talks today you know that narrative is a if narrative is a big part of your game and needs to be a big

part of your level design uh so I'd introducing myself uh I'm Jim Menzel and uh this is the kind of stuff I was concerned with when I uh joined the industry at Telltale Games uh where stories are hand authored experiences that the player experiences as they move through the Telltale Game so as a level designer or The Telltale term cinematic artist there I was really a big part of how those uh stories were being shown to the player uh right now I work at UH Ubisoft uh Ubisoft uh this is actually my office in Watchdogs but I don't work on Watch Dogs too I actually work on the new South Park game South Park the fractured but hole and my current yeah you have to think about the title um in my current uh role there uh I am a level designer but um I'm also a narrative designer because our levels and our missions and our combat are so closely linked to the story that um it's really a big part of my job to make sure that the story gets across to the player um

so similar to my roll out Telltale U at South Park our games are coming from the story they're coming from the scripts and they're coming from the IP that we're trying to show the player uh everything in the fractured butthole needs to sound to feel like a South Park episode and the player should feel like they're playing through a South Park episode um this is an actual photo of me at [Music] work um what what I mean is uh I'm always looking at the game narrative to understand how our missions and our levels are going to flow and what the nice thing about that is that even as things change we have this strong vision of the IP and the story that's been established from the beginning that continues to shape the game so even as iteration happens and surprise things Chang during game development uh we still have this kind of pillar of the IP and the story to look at uh it makes us very Nimble which is important on something like South Park which is inherently a Nimble reactive IP um

so that is a Narrative Approach to level design uh in summary it's really using the story as the true vision for your gameplay and that means treating games as a storytelling medium so gameplay and storytelling are one and the same meaning your game events are story events your story beats or gameplay beats um and it means examining the story through themes and expressing them through game design uh it's the kind of process we would use at Telltale uh taking comic book properties like The Walking Dead and fables and taking and turning them into the Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us it's how we took an action game like Borderlands and turned it into an adventure game and it's how we're taking 20 seasons of content and developing them into an RPG that feels like South Park um in summary this is really just how do I make this game level Mission Combat Etc feel like blah uh so obviously has a lot of application to IP games uh but it also has application to someone who's creating a new IP and where that comes in is when

you have an original Ip but you might have a mood board or things that you're inspired by uh it helps you analyze those Inspirations and capture their Essence in your design so for instance you know Uncharted 2 nods a lot to Indiana Jones and readers of lost Arc with a lot of its shots and gameplay it also leans to the Lost World Jurassic Park and Mission Impossible and James Bond tomor over dies uh andred to Eldorado but you know it's still its own IP but you can see when you you know analyze these things side by side you see The Inspirations so the beginning of this kind of analyzation is really just asking what makes up your narrative and that can be summarized pretty easily with the age-old six question words your why who where what when and how uh so I'm going to break these down into what they mean for the story and then we're going to break them down into what I

mean for gameplay so uh from a story perspective our y here represents our theme and this is the purpose of the thing that you're making it's the message you're trying to get to the viewer player experiencer whatever they're calling VR now uh Etc uh your who is your characters and often your characters are going to embody some part of your theme they're the vessels by which you're telling the story uh there's the setting so when and where it's happening uh the what which is your plot and events so this is when we start getting down into the beat bybe progression of the actual story you're telling uh when is the time of events relative to each other so it's how those things from our plot and events are what are structured and paced next to each other uh and then how is our presentation so how are you telling the story how are you showing these characters these settings these plots um these time of events to support

your theme so it kind of is it's not really a linear list it's really a cyclical list always going back to that theme and that feeling um that might be really confusing so I'm going to go into a uh example using a movie you might have guessed that I like a lot uh it's die hard so let's analyze Die Hard Let's Pretend We're going to make a game a Die Hard game CU who doesn't want to make a Die Hard game uh so we have six questions uh we have our theme uh Above All Die Hard is about masculinity it's an ' 80s movie of course uh and that's expressed by the following your gut instincts of mlan and also love he's very motivated by his the love of his wife and then there's some minor uh themes like greed and Duty and humility um we have characters U mlan Hans grber the villain Holly mcan's wife those guys embody the themes that we just went over uh then we dig into our aware uh it's it's the 80s it's Los

Angeles specifically this fictional building nakatomi Plaza which has unfinished floors these elevator shops it's not done being built and so there's but there's still these opulent boardrooms there's a roof in a helipad uh and the important thing about our wear here is the details of course but also the feelings that the um those spaces create so there's a lot of verticality it creates feelings of vertigo of claustrophobia they make mlan feel very isolated while he's running from the terrorists um it's also Christmas yay um which is actually important to the theme like the theme is about love and family and Christmas plays a part in that uh so our uh what is this is our this is where we actually like start digging into the plot the events of the movie so after coming to LA to patch things up with his wife mlan attempts to save her and her employe her co-workers at the nakatomi plaza that were taken hostage by a group of German terrorists that's what happens in the or in the

movie rather uh and then we're going to talk and then we get into this when and remember when is how that plot I just described is actually told so analyzing that um it's a linear storyline those events happen in chronological order you know this isn't momento it's not going backwards it's linear in chronological order there's also par parallel storytelling and what I mean by that is we're cutting between those characters uh we're looking at um a little bit of what McLean's doing versus what a little bit of the terrorists are doing uh and then th those moments um there's these slow suspenseful moments and they quickly ramp into and back out of action so you can see kind of this Cadence of those events that happen in those linear and parallel story lines and then the how which is a big one um lots of suspense it's a thriller uh locks of action scenes when they do ramp into them and then it's kind of sub um subset by these uh irreverent moments of humor from mlan so he has his like on liners he makes little jokes he kind of

questions the whole conceit of the thing as he's moving through this crazy building uh and then the other thing is it's an omni point of view so uh what that means is we as the viewer know what every character is doing even if U McLean and Hans the villain do not know what each other is doing the drama is coming from us watching those two characters discover what's happening so that was so we defin all that about die hard and so we have our um are six question words and we have the six story things that those uh complement so what I do from here is that I separate our top three into story cont constants so these are things that um are just a part of your story inherently um and then the bottom three are what I call the game variables so as we start digging into how to make this a game we kind of already have these top three things defined um you know uh when you have something like walking dead or Wolf Among Us where you're adding in

characters to existing IP you're using the IP's theme to build those characters and build those settings if they are new to the IP but it's pretty well defined by the IP or the story already uh where things get interesting and we're going to start making these into game things uh is the bottom three so we're going to turn plot and events into mechanics so uh the things that are happening are the things that are happening they're the mechanics that you're using uh time events becomes pacing and presentation becomes tone and Tone's pretty big but we'll get that to that a later but first mechanics uh so mechanics are the methods by which the player interacts with the game aha uh so that's the gameplay definition from a story perspective it's the methods by which the player experiences the story now mechanics are largely going to be defined by your genre uh and what I have here are three different Fallout games they're part of the Fallout AP but they all have different mechanics um and

each of those uh different genres of Fallout game support the themes of Fallout in a different way so while you have simulation mechanics in Fallout Shelter such as like building U managing people uh versus the open world mechanics you know your action your shooting your cover they're all informed by this IP um where things get interesting is pacing so pacing our time and events of our story um the Rhythm and tempo of our gameplay it's the rate of activity or movement and the flow of your gameplay uh from a story perspective it's the exact same thing it's the flow of the story so it's all about flow Rhythm Tempo uh and so we have our mechanics defined probably by our game already now we want to control the pace of those events and those how those mechanics are used and Pace in video games is really just how hard is a player being pushed to move forward versus asked to stay put

uh so movement incentives versus movement deterrence uh mov incentives um pretty obvious like if you put a threat behind somebody they're going to go the other direction man I'm glad you guys know this movie still I don't feel old um objectives uh if you played Mario Sunshine uh they learn you learn very early on you pretty much always want to clear out goo and so even when the objective of the level isn't completely obvious there's moment to moment breadcrumbing of the objective of I need to clean this place um if you haven't played Mario sunshine it's the same concept as the original Super Mario games where there's coins you want to collect coins you hav played Super Mario I don't know what to tell you um and then a couple other incentives movement meaning um movement around the player so other NPCs walking by them uh a big trick games like to play is uh an NPC will take your objective so combo those things and that BC will run away so double incentive um

and then time limits which have kind of fallen out of Vogue uh but you know you can look to a lot of older games like uh Sonic 2 um there a time limit to how long you can be underwater so you get out of being underwater as fast as you can it's a very big incentive to keep going upwards and then we have our deterrence uh so the first deterent here is tension and that's a perceived threat um it's the difference between seeing a guy over there and wanting to hide from him and think about how you're going to deal with him versus just getting bombarded by Bad Dudes so it's that perceived threat that's going to slow a player down uh then we have obstacles obviously put something in their way going to slow them down pretty easy and then we have change in gameplay and movement uh the examples I have here are puzzles and dialogue choices and we'll get in that we'll dig into that in a moment uh how changing the kind of mode of gameplay players and is going to slow

them down uh but first I want to talk about pacing and storytelling methods so there's a lot of ways to tell a story in a game and those techniques also have an effect on the pace uh so I'm going to analyze a couple storytelling not a couple a few a few storytelling methods in games and we're going to evaluate them on two axis it's they're allowing for game play and how they tell the story um put another way it's their player agency that they afford and the certainty of delivery meaning how certain am I that this plot point is going to be expressed because I'm telling the story in this way uh so to get some examples on the board uh cutscenes are a high certainty low agency way to tell a story because you're making the player look at it and watch it ver versus the inverse which is environmental storytelling low certainty but High agency the player chooses to engage or not in your particular story

um and then we have triggered dialogue and narrative systems uh but first they're better described visually so here we have a graph um explaining player agency and certainty of delivery so environmental storytelling is up on the high agency low certainty spectrum and cuts scenes are kind of complimenting that on the other end so low agency High certainty and then we have some um techniques by which triggered dialogue is often uh shown so on our h Spectrum it's things like shouts things like barks stuff the player might miss but is present in the world and tells a story uh in the middle here we have uh audio logs and narration which you know are great cuz the player can move around but they may or may not be listening to them and it's hard to kind of account if they have or not um walk and talks kind of round out uh and then we have uh over by cut scenes uh just a little bit more player agency than Cuts scenes are qtes because they're interactive cut scenes let's be

honest and um so what we what we're finding here is this kind of curve and this curve represents how much the player is in control of the narrative exposition of the story uh the inverse of this being of course how much control you as a designer have and these aren't really um here to judge these on Better or Worse what this is here to help you judge is uh what's more appropriate for your story and what's going to apply to your pace better to get your story and your feelings across uh so up uh kind of above our curve which seems very enticing is uh dialogue and game playay choices uh but the caveat with those even though they have this great High agency High delivery you're asking the player to change how they're playing your game very specifically to a certain a different mode of gameplay it might not fit in your genre it might not fit in your um IP or your story at all um but it can be useful if you want to

support that kind of thing in your game uh we had to be very careful with them at Telltale because uh They do change um how how the players flow so we might have a flow state where a player is kind of just uh this is an example from episode three where uh the players trying to solve a mystery of who's stealing food and you're walking around and you're picking up Clues and then suddenly you tell Kenny you killed somebody um and it can be very jarring and like changing that kind of gameplay can kind of pull them out of that flow of the mystery and detract them um it was fine in the situation because inherently this part of the gameplay was in the beginning of the game it was very slow um but something like this isn't appropriate when we want to have the player go into an action moment so you know when Le's exploring the kitchen where Clementine lives we're going to use something like a qte to keep the flow of the pace going and often we'll try to complement the camera angles to keep our uh Pace keep it keep keep that mode of gameplay from changing too much uh so

even if the way the player is controlling the game is changing there's a flow that's maintained because the cameras make sense and they flow like a movie um and that way we can still have moments of character development but they're kind of sandwich between these moments of [Music] gameplay now I'm going to dig into tone so tone is how you're presenting your theme uh it's the style or the manner of expression your piece of work has um it's how you're approaching the theme and it's how you're attaining the feeling that you want to find in your players uh so how to how to set the tone there's many ways to set the tone uh cameras and your Viewpoint uh your lighting your color palette uh how your characters are written um you know not only and not only the characters but also your menus and your UI anything that's telling the player something uh and then also your character's

performances uh acting and vo so how the characters are moving how the characters are delivering their voice and of course music and sound effects so these are the kind of things that really need to be aligned with your original Ip if you are using IP or at least need to be analyzed if you're using a mood board or a collection of Inspirations uh something we did actually on um especially Wolf Among Us is we act like Wolf Among Us is based on fables which is a vertico comic and you know we didn't have any cinematic reference from a TV show but we had the comic and we actually analyzed the comic from a camera Viewpoint so even if you're not working from a movie or television show you can still find those visual Inspirations um with Walking Dead we even went outside walking dead itself because we were very inherently working off of the comic universe so we found other horror movies other ways that horror was portrayed um and character moments were portrayed within horror to get that done so again tone is really the presentation

of your theme uh I have three games up here uh the first one's Mafia 3 Grand that Auto 5 and Saints Row uh what they all have in common is their open world their action adventure games they all start with a bank robbery weirdly I guess that was a thing um and but like the way this bank robbery is portrayed is they're all very different uh Mafia is about is a very serious game it's about you know racial tension the 1960s in the American South pretty serious so the pallets are very um there's a lot of contrast uh they often use kind of one color overlaid on the rest of the game to get an emotion out of that color and go from there GTA even though this is a very tense scene and it's kind of the one where everything like really goes to [ __ ] for the characters you still see high saturation and lots of colors it GT is ready to be a cinematic game from the get-go even when it has to be a little more muted than normal uh you'll see a

lot of break colors while you're driving around any gtk game uh then Saints Row I could not pinpoint the theme of Saints Row to be honest I think if you ask why to a Saints Row game you get the answer why not um but and you can see that and how they portray the game there's there's bright colors it's pinks it's cyan it's it's it goes ball the wall it does not care and that's great like that it knows what it is and that's the theme and the feeling that they are trying to find so getting back to Die Hard why we're all here uh so Die Hard has a game which I don't know if you guys have played it's on the PS1 it's the Die Hard Trilogy I just want to show you part one of Die Hard which is I guess based on the first Die Hard movie this is a really fun game by the way um out of context not knowing it's a Die Hard game it is kind of about police

police brutality even my it's a really good soundtrack [Music] too don't let him get away die [Music] Cowboy ah that's better TR so I can't underscore enough how fun this game is but um let's look at it critically for a second the story that we learned about die hard this game um we had masculinity through violence primarily um pretty much only mlan on the characters you didn't really see anybody else there we're in nakom Plaza I think

um uh I'm killing bad guys if someone asked me the story of that game I'd say I shot a lot of guys and they said some funny on liners that were from the movie and that happened in a very linear singular constant flow uh it was told through third person wide shots there was lots of quii PE constant action fast-paced music that kicks ass that music really good let's get real um so it's not much as die hard as it is kind of a product of its time in video games which was Doom Quake uh Resident Evil down here even um that's more the feeling of this game CU it's very much influenced by the games of its time Not Die Hard the movie um you guys want to watch Die Hard okay we've all seen die hard we won't watch the whole movie I definitely like watch this movie twice while making this GDC presentation um so we didn't get to I actually realize that's a longer clip than I wanted to show but uh the point

of it is that McLean's not running around and shooting people uh he uses his gun as a as a puzzle tool honestly like he uses it to open a door uh later on in that scene he actually is going to put that gun in the fan to stop it uh he then puts the gun into a vent or into An Elevator Shaft ties a rope to it and repels down the elevator shop using that he doesn't use it as a weapon it's a it's a puzzle inventory tool he's samon Max basically um so again like it's really and again like he was running from those guys he wasn't getting he wasn't shooting someone like a doom um it's really less like doom and more like something like inside actually where you should feel like you're being chased and feel like you're running away from something that's more powerful than you he he's a New York Police Department cop he's not a German terrorist who's trying to do this as a job so really quickly I just want to um wrap up like die hard this elevator shop scene or lead lead into the elevator

shop scene um it has that masculinity theme of falling your gut and love because he's really doing this for his wife I guess um it's really focused on mlan but also Carl like we see a lot of shots of Carl who has this Vendetta against mlan for killing his brother if you're familiar with the film uh so it's really not just about our hero here it's about the enemy as well uh where it's not K to Plaza but specifically the shafts and vents before that we talked about that caused those feelings of anxiety and isolation um it has uh so what happens in these scenes he's mostly escaping and outwitting the terrorists so he's keeping one step ahead of them by using his gun as an adventure game puzzle Tool uh it's linear it's that fast action mixed with the slower tense moments uh Die Hard has a lot of slow moments in fact a gun doesn't get fired until 18 minutes in uh it takes a lot of time to set itself up but that's what makes those action scenes feel so good when you do get to

them and then the how I can dig into this forever but on a high level uh the suspension danger is shown with tight cameras tense music uh we still get those personal moments with mlan lots of shots of his eyes bugging out and freaking out about something um and moments of levity uh we didn't get to the um the part where he's putting the gun in the Elevator Shaft but he just kind of has a lot of like [ __ ] John what are you doing H and he kind of does that the whole movie um but that's important to like how how that feels and how it kind of offsets that suspense and danger um so again we have our lovely themes or our lovely uh story contents that we're going to put in this little blue box and then our red themes we're going to put in this red box and then let's make a Die Hard game so I'm going to assume this is an action game um as much as I want to make an adventure game for die hard I don't know how many producers would say yes to that so let's assume we're making an action game we're going to use mechanics from that so our

verbs were outscape escape and out with the terrorists uh so we look at escape and we find running we find looking for cover the act of looking for the cover and outwit so stealth using that cover being strategic about when you go out and attack somebody and doing puzzles um from Pacing you know fast action slow tense Ms so our fast moments we're probably going to get the story through with qtes um cutcenes things that we can get by quickly um even the player might lose control for a second um we're getting the story moments in we need as fast as we can and then in slow tense moments we're giving the player that air to breathe so they can look at the environment they can hear shouts uh they can kind of take in things at their own pace and then presentation again uh your story and like your Source material and your gameplay should be pretty United here so take cameras tense music personal moments moments of levity integrating these things into your game however you can is going to be critical to making it feel like the source material like the

target thing you're trying to make um in a nutshell That's A Narrative Approach to level design [Music] [Applause]