Level Design Workshop: Level Flow for a Video Game Mixtape

[Music] all right hello a couple quick reminders one please turn off your cell phones to don't forget to fill out your survey if you like to talk if you don't like you don't fill it out just getting filled out either way and three I would like to acknowledge that we are currently in being in San Francisco Bay Area we're occupying indigenous Aloni land and just click something to be aware of and then before we get started a quick note you know just it's a perilous time that we live in right now in the United States you know fascism is creeping in and the Muslim travel ban as well as the proposed proposed border wall I think are xenophobic [ __ ] and I just want to take a second to appreciate what a privilege it is for all of us to be able to come to this conference and to talk about games and to think about this there's a lot of developers who perhaps

don't feel safe coming to this country and for a very good reason and it upsets me that the current climate in this country and institutionalized racism is discriminating against fellow game developers from being here as well as fellow human beings with that being said hi this is double flow for a video game mixtape I am Akuma there is my couple social media handles I also have a hashtag if you want to live tweet any of this you can use hashtag GDC mixtape you can see there I made a game called freaking weekend or I'm finishing up at the moment we showed it at indicate last year and I'll talk more about that and how it works with video game mixtapes shortly quick couple notes about myself I'm from Los Angeles I'm an LA native I'm part of a collection a group of community of any game developers called glitch City and I've been making games for about three and a half years now and I'm also alumni of USC the University of

Southern California specifically the School of Cinematic Arts their inner interactive media and games MFA graduate program so hopefully a lot of you saw the title video game mixtape and we're kind of intrigued by that so we want what is a video game mixtape and perhaps one day we'll have a vocabulary that doesn't rely on antiquated media to talk about games and what we're doing but for now it's fun to explore that so I would say that a video game mixtape is an intentional collection of minigames and the sum is greater than its parts I have minigames in quotation marks because I feel like the term minigame is a little problematic mini is inherently inferior and it reinforces this capitalist idea that the value of a game is related to its length I do like the term vignette games but video game mix teams aren't necessarily made of all vignettes so for now we'll just stick with mini games so here's our track listing you can see we got through the intro we're going currently through what it's a video game mixtape and I have a couple other tracks here so we've got

some good stuff for you and before we go deeper what's perhaps take a step back and think what is the mixtape I think most of you here are old enough to have experience whether it's on a cassette tape form or a CD some form of mix tape but basically you would record your favorite songs onto a tape or a CD perhaps you record them off the radio or from another tape or from a computer but it took a while to make this physical media so you put a lot of thought into it and though I do want to see games I bring together works from a bunch of different authors I think that'd be kind of hard because everything code the code that everyone used to make games it's all separate so compiling that would be very difficult and besides I'm a little bit more interested in looking at the modern hip hop mixtape so here's a few hip-hop mixtapes from the last couple years and hip hop hip hop mixtape typically you have a rapper who's you know rapping on every track and they have guest producers they have featured artists they have other musicians in and you know these guys are recording and

women they're recording you know dozens of songs so you can put together a mixtape to show off your skills to build up hype for your commercial album that you're going to release and really just show off your practice and your hustle and your progress and I think that's a really cool model to look at when we think about games so how could we adapt this this format well thankfully it falls in line with I don't know if you've seen this I read he's a DJ with NPR and he talks about you know we have this skills gap where we have taste good taste in games as I'm sure a lot of you here have but the things that we make when we start they're not quite as good as what we what we like to think of so he advocates just making a high volume of work in order to close that gap and also falls in line with what this is Adriel and Rahmi two people I met my first year at USC and they were talking about doing a game a week so this idea that you make one game per week and at the end of the

week you toss out or not toss out but you just competently abandon what it is that you made but it's as you're rapidly making things going through this process you know think of the idea prototype it test it make it refine it repeat and I think that that's you know really falls in line with this idea of video game mix tapes so that's what I did I had to make a game while I was at USC for my thesis I had a year to put together a project so I instead of making one I decided I'm gonna make you know dozens I'm just gonna make a bunch of little things and allow that to build up my process and then you can see I tied it together in this mobile phone interface and all these little icons represent the different apps and in some ways to this is my rapper struggle album you know just very much you know struggling financially going through school being a long-distance relationship a lot of things were going on at that time in my life so you know this is sort of therapy in form of art so you know making a lot of things and I perhaps took that a little bit too much to heart here's my unity project folder where there's just tons and tons of projects and actually

counted recently and in the last year outside of freaking weekend which is my my thesis I've made like 20 other game projects or 28 depending how you cut them which is like crazy to me and not all of them have been released a lot of them are just kind of like really solid prototypes but again it just speaks to this method of practice to improve our skills but a couple notes if you are going to make a video game mixtape you would want rather than this to have all of your games inside of one project folder and make sure your naming schemes are tight because a lot of times I just rely on typing to search for the files that I want as well as don't fear short game experiences especially when you're making a mix this is Joey Ramone from the punk band The Ramones and a lot of punk band punk rock songs can be very short but we don't really call them like mini songs right they're just songs it's just music and there's a nice quote that I like where someone asked Joey Ramone about why the Ramones songs are all so fast and he said or why they're all so short and he

said we actually play very long songs but we just play them very fast so I love it I love that he flips it it's all relative anyways what does it matter we should just make what we want to make this is the freakin weekend inspirations mix you might recognize some of these games I'm not going to go into all of them but a lot of these games have this sort of mixed feel to it or they a variety of gameplay or you know the gameplay a lot of times is really relaxed as well so it's not like you run the risk of losing or failing or not getting good as you play you're gonna get through a lot of these experiences or they do something interesting with music or sound and for me I realized that a lot of these influenced my style to not just make experimental work but things that are experiential so it's about the metaphor of what it is that you're doing but we want to use simple and fun mechanics to do that so we're gonna use the language of gameplay we're gonna use the language of feedback and juiciness and teaching our player different things in order to have them do these kind of metaphors and then the secret for video game mixtape is before

the player gets forward or when the normally when the difficulty would increase we just move on to the next game and that was sight a here we kind of flip over the tape and move on to the b-side where we got freakin weekend lump Oh a spooky game snacks and some other examples that we can look at here's our updated track listing and actually there's a typo six in eight should be flipped but nevermind that but yeah freakin weekend I mentioned you earlier this is my video game mixtape my most personal one you can see it's in a mobile phone interface and when people play it it's like you're going through someone's phone or perhaps you're performing as me so the little bit intentionally vague as to who the player is when they're playing this but you know it's very much using the affordances of the phone I want to look at first a couple of micro examples of level design of what I made and then we'll look at the macro of how they all fit together so here's an

example I'm sure a lot of you have you know relate to coding and making games using unity perhaps so this game I just sort of copied my setup from home and you know you can type on if you look at the bottom phone you can see just typing on the keyboard and they'll text shows up so very much just about you know the joy of typing if you can get into typing code but you know you can't type anything wrong you just type this text shows up and then you can move on to the next level to ask if you want to save it and then you can move from there and a lot of this these games that I made is just reflecting on my life thinking if this was a game that this was what would the mechanics be what would the player be doing what type of emotion what I want to tell doing this I made another game about meditation I went to this Buddhist meditation retreat a couple years back and I had a pretty big impact on me talking about mindfulness and breathing a few time your breathing to that gif up the top if you feel anxious or whatever it can help you to just relax I will turn that into a game and

gameplay mechanics so we thought of this idea where you're touching the screen and you're growing this circle sort of similar to what the shape is doing and then we put some mantras of people what they meditate could meditate to thinking about in the back of your head as well as some fun visuals to really show the conveyed and teach this mindfulness breathing mechanic if you will but the player is actually doing the physical breathing while they're touching the screen I made a gamergate game about you know Twitter what it's like to have a Twitter hate mob descending on you because when I was working on this project that was definitely kept going on I haven't so in this game you can swipe to move the camera and when you look at these little anime and game avatars they like cuss at you and say really mean things to you and I wanted to create this sort of audio assault for the players so as they clear a certain number of them are as they clear them more show up and as they clear a certain number of them I have different things that trigger different audio things to

make the player feel paranoid different things that I do to the environment to really ramp up that and i thankfully have not been the subject of a Twitter hate mob but back in the day I wrote a blog about this game that had sort of racist imagery in it and you know a bunch of people descended on the comments and said you know pretty awful things on one of my favorites was someone saying a [ __ ] Alejandro Kuan Madrid that's my legal name but this is from PSP game or six one nine and I think it's funny cuz it's six one nine and not six nine like I don't know I think it's funny now to look back at it but at the time too it didn't feel good it felt pretty awful because I was like oh my career's ruined I can never work in the games industry again but obviously that's not true but you know how do we express that feeling how do we convey that to a player in in game play and a couple other examples is um I have a game where you're rolling a joint and you're breaking up weed and you blow it out the window and if you live at home with your mom that's what you do when you don't wander to smell it is you blow the smoke out the window so I wanted to put that in a game I have another one at the bottom you can see you're rotating this phone and as you

rotate it's like a kaleidoscope in the different shapes move and that's my 94 Civic in there and you can tap on the Diamonds tacos will show up at some point I'm just it's a music toy so as you rotate it different notes will play and it beats playing so it's really much just you know like a music video almost and it's a way that I could also make an homage to driving without actually building a driving engine and having the whole driving game because that's way too much work as well as I have to hear messages a lot of these are actually from my phone at the time when I made this I go what were the latest responses and messages I had with my friends and I put those in there but it's done to do world-building because people might read those snippets and be like oh I wonder what that was about so it creates this whole since a world even though I don't go through like explaining or you know resolving some of those things it's just to kind of make everything feel a little bit more believable as well as I can put in different you know Arg or different you know mini games where you're messaging people back and forth and different story elements we

can reveal that way and I also have the little star button at the bottom and that's how you can navigate back to the level select screen so some of the games they kind of channel you through and some of them you can press it and it'll knock you back to here this is my level select screen alright so we made this example but I made a bunch of pieces now what do we do with them this is sergei eisenstein who is a soviet filmmaker and film theorist so you talk about this thing called montage and there's other names for it now or people think of montage as being something different but the idea is that the order that people see different images in film will affect what they have they interpret it the preceding image will influence what they think of the next one etc so we can use that to our advantage humans like we love stories we love hearing stories we love telling stories we love thinking stories and figuring things out and that's great because then we can just put out these different elements and the player when they play through them they're gonna start to figure out okay what's the story what's going on here so we don't have to be explicit about it as designers we can

have it be intentionally vague and still have like a general idea of what we want it to be but we don't have to be explicit with it so it's great because it gives you a lot of freedom but yeah montage so we can take like the coding game here and in the game after you test the game that phone pops up and you look at it and it knocks you all right now you're playing the game or you're testing the one that you are supposedly working on and you can see this one's you know sort of modeled after a Space Harrier and Star Fox and some of these other games and this one so if we look at the action beats but the Taiping one's kind of fun but it's kind of a lull to because you're just kind of exploring this little space and then this other game where you're flying does a really nice song that plays and there's all this sort of more action and it's intentionally a little bit more gamey in that there's like a combo meter and like money but at the end there's a surprise twist where I flip it on its head so we have this fun transition and now we have a little bit more action going on so how do we move from this to another game well since we're using a mobile phone what I do is I have a little notification pop down to tell you

that oh people responded to your message on the Twitter or as I call it critter app it's like creepy Twitter so it's critter as opposed to Twitter but lets you know that that's been updated so when you tap on that banner it then opens up the Twitter app and then now we go from having you know a higher state of tension a little bit to now we ramp it up dramatically so the players now getting really intense I've had people say how affecting playing this was because you're just hearing all this negative they being said to you and even though it's not like personalized explicitly towards each player there's still that feeling where people internalize it so it's like okay now I have the player in this sort of heightened state what do we do with that because how do you what do you go to next that doesn't seem kind of trivial or doesn't isn't kind of weird so it seemed obvious to then go to the meditation game afterwards and I like that because it gives the player a tool that they can use to come down from not just like a literal tool in the game but

also like a internal tool that they can use to you know sort of recollect themselves at one point I had a jump cut that took you from the Twitter game to the meditation game but people found that to be very disorienting especially when they're trying to process all this sort of negativity that's happening so instead I had another banner that pops down to tell you oh your meditation app has been updated so now you can tap on that to go or if you go back to the title screen the meditation app will be available as a new icon for you to try out when you're ready so creating that space in between the apps was really important to give the player a little bit room to process a little bit room to breathe and then it's also like traditional game design where you have a really intense gameplay moment so you might have something where you're in a town or you're doing something that's much more relaxed to sort of balance out those more intense moments it can't be intense all the time so you know we want to take into consideration what's the emotional arc of the player another example so you have this weed smoking rolling a joint a light puzzle game which there's actually like a lot of work to make this one because apparently not everyone knows how to roll a joint

some people didn't feel comfortable doing it yes I thought it was just funny but it was a lot of little tricks I had to put in here to sort of teach people how to do that and after you you know roll it it goes in the first person and you can look around the room you find the phone you pick up the phone and it goes into the driving game so you know now's this question this is kind of more psychedelic game so is the player high right now am i high right now and you're playing as me you know it's intentionally vague but you know there is some I do want you to think you know that the weed effects carry over into the next one and then Midway when you're playing through this you know this psychedelic driving game I decide to interrupt it with a phone call from moms so then you have to talk to my mom and you have me in a little chat our options of what you can say to respond and I thought that was kind of funny because like who's gonna want to play a game he wanna play a video game where you talk to my mom on the phone like that sounds really stupid I'm not stupid but like you know you're not gonna maybe only a special type of gamer might be initially interested in that so

I thought how can we trick people into having this conversation well we can bait and switch them you start off with a weed game hey that's fun this is funny look at me I'm on a joint you know oh cool now it's all trippy and psychedelic oh [ __ ] like I've had people play the game and then hand me the phone when the it looks like it's ringing because they thought that someone was calling me but it's like I don't know it's part of the game keep playing you know so you kind of trick them into doing this and then most people then would say oh was really like kind of boring but not boring in a bad way but in the way that it actually does feel when you talk to your parents and they're telling you all these things and you're just trying to get moved with a conversation along so I was like a fun way to transition between those and then a secret slide here the work in progress so I have a video chat one that's more just about the frustrations of video chat so you can see that as one number two is sort of this sex stream that I had or that I wanted to make grachi was like a sex scene but I wanted to be about consensual sex I wanted to be like healthy relationships and stuff like that but I thought how can I work this into this game because it seems kind of

out of left field so my thought was what if we have you know this scene were you doing a video chat and then when we jump into that one it's implied that it's more of a dream because then it puts it more about myself and like what I'm thinking as opposed to you know suggesting that it's with my partner or something else because that's a little bit weird and then after that scene we go into where you're in the room you're by yourself and then you see a helicopter outside because for any of you that live in the hood a lot of times it's not uncommon to wake up in the mill the night to a helicopter circling around your neighborhood looking for somebody so that was like an emotional beat that I wanted to put in as well to kind of switch up the flow and then the last scene I'm working with my friend Paloma Dawkins and we're doing this sort of like mini adventure game and it's not you know just one scene and there's things you can click on there's dialogue and a little bit of a sense of progression and this is an example too of when you make video game mix tapes what you can do or at least when you're making these sort of short vignettes is as a designer I can build out the system she actually just do a bunch of sketches when we were hanging and then I chopped up those sketches and

put those in just so you can see what the games gonna look like so then I'm building out a lot of the pieces and then showing it back to her and then she comes back in and puts the art in and that's kind of the beauty too is because when you're making these small pieces I'm not asking an artist hey do you want to commit to my project for the next two years and do all the art for it no hey do you want to come in and do your magic on this one piece and just do a couple drawings and I can make them work and do you know make it work for what we're trying to do but yes that's another chapter here's the update and as few other examples that I want to look at this is Lumbo this is a game that I made with a very talented artist ami ami Huang and she did some of the art on freakin weekend so for here we went through a similar process and she kind of got what I was doing with the freakin weekend as a mixtape so she kind of went in and did her own thing so we had these vignettes so you can see you're putting stickers on the phone and it's like a gift from somebody oh it's about we made this for the URI game Jam so it's about you know unrequited love yeah you know attraction crushes between

two people are two youth so one they're you know watching TV and as you click on the TV to change the channels it progresses the dialogue and then the bottom one you can see you click on the cat bottle caps they fly around and all these mechanics were kind of driven by this idea being in the suburbs and being bored and how can we build a game around that so we just got together and jammed and knock each of these pieces out this one's a little bit different though because it doesn't really require a certain order freaking weekend I do want you to play every piece in a certain order for the montage to make sense but this one they're a little bit more freeform so you have we have this order that we want you to play them in that where we list the apps on the top right from top to bottom but you know any order that you played in doesn't really matter a lot of people have done let's play videos and it's kind of cool to see people explore them in different orders but everyone kind of gets the same themes and the same ideas after they played a couple of them okay I'm starting to get with that what that means and this is available on each die oh if you want to download it's free pump--ow lu MP oh and this is also on edge this is spooky game snacks EP so I

made a bunch of little short I did this for game Tober something that I guess I made up but inktober people were doing in October drawing a drawing a day so I thought it'd be kind of fun what if we made a game a day and not like a crazy game but like a one-button game a1 interaction game so the first one is pumpkin but that's in the top-left corner and that one you tap on the pumpkin and it explodes it's called pumping but because I'm not a good modeler so I couldn't make it look like a real pumpkin inside so because it looked all round I'll just change the title it's called pumpkin butt and that's intentional but that one you know you just press it it squishes makes it really good sound but it is kind of like on or off and it's juicy but you know there's not a lot of room for player exploration so we have candy corn is gross which is in the top right corner where you're just clicking around and you can throw candy corn in the trash where it belongs or you could throw it on the floor and other places and you can see in the bottom corner I have these arrows so rather than having this force progression when you're ready to move on from this game to the next one you can click on the arrow and it'll move you along the bottom left one is

cocoa dip I let that which is a coconut popsicle Mexican popsicle and when I made this in October it was like 85 degrees in Los Angeles so it's like super hot and it doesn't feel like autumn at all but I thought it'd be funny to have a you know a little snack break halfway between these five pieces and then afterwards the fourth one is a spider friend and that one talking to the spider and then you realize it lives from your ear and it's kind of gross but you know a chance to kick up the narrative a little bit more so one it's just kind of this the pumpkin to draw you in the candy corn to make it more playful and give you more room for self-expression the Paletta to kind of take a break where you click and it just eats itself and then it falls the spider wanted to have a little bit of a narrative kick where all of a sudden it's like oh now what's going on and then the last one I call it a glitch kitty and that one you play as a cat on a broomstick flying over this world and you can wave magic in the air and my friend clover and sealife did a really great song for it it's about a 45 second song and at the end we fade out to the title so I really like it because I feel like it's a nice crescendo and climax and we have this song that sort of caps

off everything and really does make it feel like what I call an EP which would be an extended play in music but you know for our intents and purposes it's a another video game mixtape and a lot of these ideas stem from this guy or at least I take inspiration from this guy this is a gunpei yokoi who designed the Gameboy and the Virtual Boy and he's working for an worked for a Nintendo late-late designer he talked about lateral thinking with withered technology and that's this idea that we have all this technology available to us now it's cheap it's accessible we all know how to use unity there's lots of documentation our players they know how to play screen based games they know how to play games on their phone so if everything's so accessible and affordable then we should think laterally of what kind of stories we want to tell let's use it to tell stories and innovative and new ways that people haven't done yet rather than always chasing the cutting edge everyone's gonna always you know chase after that deep you saw the line for the VR talk next door is like down over to the bathroom but you know I'm very grateful for all of you to be

here with me you know so VR is like super expensive for developers as well as for consumers so if you stick to whether the technology you know we can make things that are certainly more accessible to the larger group of people so to wrap up a couple keys to video game mixtapes one is to embrace the creative freedom so as you make it you can just make whatever you want just make a bunch of little pieces and you know you can figure out what its gonna be as you make them you might notice trends in your art or what you're interested in and you'll figure out the order as you make it some of these seem like they're well planned out but it's not I just made a bunch of things that I thought would be kind of cool and then I figured out later how can we start piecing them together because I had to show some work to my class okay let's just I have three let's just piece them together and come up with retro script a story as to why but just remember that the players are going to figure out or they're gonna make up the connections for you so you don't have to be explicit with it and it's the diversity of experiences is what's really going to enhance the mix to is to keep it flexible and modular the beauty about

working in this way is if like for me I got like way better every couple months that I was working on this project so I could just quarantine all the bad code like oh my god why did i code it this way well it works so we'll just put that in the corner and not touch it anymore not build any systems on top of that but you know we have this piece that works and then we'll just make sure the next piece that we do we're gonna code it and organize or organize our files in a much better way I mean if you make something cool later it doesn't have to be a ton of work to implement it because it's a mix so you can just add in this cool thing afterwards as well as like I mentioned earlier it's a great way to get collaborator collaborators to work because you're building these small pieces and it's much more visible tangible for them how they would fit in oh I need you to make this art look better I need you to do a song for this little piece I need you to do sound effects or code to make some of these things smoothen out there's a lot that we can do you know to respect people's times both for our fellow developers as well as for the players get in do your thing and get out that's a big part of it right you don't want to just linger

too long on one piece because someone might get bored or you know I think it's good err on the side of caution because you could say all have you played my game no okay well just takes a couple minutes and then you're done versus have you played my game cool it's a 60-hour experience and you can start off in the first town or whatever and you know people don't have the time for that so explore the system of with each piece that you're making but keep everything moving so that it stays interesting and then lastly especially for younger game developers I trust that the process will build your style in your game development chops you know we're doing repetitions here we're making things for making a lot of things and we're not really concerned about the outcome of how good they are if they're gonna make a lot of money or anything we're just focused on this small little piece but it's like you know making an over scoped game or any game that we think is regularly scoped is like running a marathon and for a lot of younger developers it's like well have you ever worked out before have you ever exercised before no but I think if I run hard enough I can just like make it work right like now running a marathon I don't think works that way right you have to work up to it so I really believe in this process to build your

chops to build your style because things are gonna emerge as you start to after you get to like the 20th thing that you've made you're gonna like oh I have a style now here's the updated track listing just have a quick outro for you a year ago I showed this at the indie I should freaking weekend at La zine fest and a journalist said to me that that was the most immersive experience he had said it is wildly creative and how it deconstructs the traditional video game experience I also think it speaks compellingly to each player's personal life and modernity though it is autobiographical there's also an aspect of voyeurism to the game that is magnetic and he sent me this and I'm just like wow that sounds great sure like that sounds wonderful like this is my game okay and I think it just kind of it's validating for what I did because again I just made all these pieces and started to string them together and then he was able to absorb and abstract all this meaning from it and it's very much intentional but it just you know when you're knee-deep in it it doesn't really seem like some of these things will come across but he got it my other favorite hot take on freaking

weekend is when I showed it indicate last year a Japanese game journalist played it and asked if he wanted to write about it after playing and it was mainly in regards to the weed scene but he said maybe if I wrote about your game I would be fired and I thought that was great because you know not that the game is bad but it's like a cool I'm doing something I'm doing something that's provoking people doing something that might be controversial and I think that you know in terms of making video game mixtapes there's a lot of room there for people to explore so thank you if you make a video game mixtape please send it to me I would love to play it and see you know how you interpret some of these ideas I think that some of what I'm talking about here is very much influenced by a lot of my colleagues in Los Angeles and other people that I've met so you know video games the beautiful thing is it's global so I want to see what you have to say and what you have to make if you want to also have an update one freaking weekend's out you can go to freakin weekend calm and I

have a mail English you can leave in your email and I will get back to you when it's done do we have time for no questions one question any questions you don't have to you one I can ask a question yes no I just I just want to rap you want to rap yeah yeah be have you ever thought about doing this in the context of glitch city where maybe you guys independently assemble some sort of I guess there wouldn't be a mixtape as much as like a greatest like and now what you call this is what you call music kind of thing I've thought about it it's kind of hard though because everyone's sort of doing their own thing and time is money so it's hard to ask people to step away from their their main project to work on something like this but that's why I think if I did a lot of the work and just kind of have them come in and just do something for a couple hours that could work another idea that I want to explore is doing a beautiful corpse is that what they're called to just have a unity project open and everyone can just take turns going up to it and doing adding something to it sounds like the closest I thought of it but you know in the future as I think as some of this is

more explored and more mainstream hopefully then more people will get it and want you you know put time into it and we can figure out ways to make it work so thank you but yeah thank you everybody for listening for being here I hope you have a great rest of your conference and fill out your surveys thank you [Applause]