Set this Game in Order: Organizing Hundreds of Levels and Mechanics

[Music] everybody if you could turn off your cell phones and make sure to fill out the forms afterwards I'd be great everybody loving that ordering on the word order does it bother anybody yeah it's kind of awful right cool all right so my name is Nathan Fouts I'm from mommy's best games and we're going to set this game in or their so we're gonna look at ways to organize levels and lots of mechanics and what can happen when you have a game that's got a lot of stuff to keep track of and what you should be doing to manage all that but before we get into that we're gonna talk about some basics of difficulty curves level design mindsets and ways to think about level design and some examples of games with lots of mechanics and then some possible solutions

so back in 2007 after working in triple-a for a few years there I ended up going independent with mommy's best games and we made a lot of shoot him ups over the years there and we made shoot one up and that God is recognized by devolver digital and we got to make a serious and game for them in 2d called serious am double D XXL and I created the idea of the Gunz stacker you do the same guess to stack his guns one on top of the other to shoot the bad guys that game he had 40 weapons and over 20 levels and it was already starting to get to be a big mess I loved it uses promotional art I never get to use it so it's sewing there's there's a teacup stacker you know so in 2013 I began working on what we our biggest game yet called pig eat ball it is a classically styled kind of arcade adventure game it has hundreds of levels lots of bosses a story it's non procedural all handmade and it had a whole bunch of stuff to keep track of and it's like six to ten hours long so

it's a lot of stuff going on so I was trying to figure out how are we going to keep track of all the mechanics how do I know what everything is in the game how am I going to balance my difficulty curve there so in any game this is a 2d game but it still applies to the bigger 3d games how do you keep track of if someone changes a mechanic in the game check what changes one of the enemy types if they had a new one and you want to insert it into the middle of your game you shouldn't be testing a 10-hour game every time something changes right so you should know where those enemies show up in the game so that's the kind of problems I wanted to get into and I looked at talk to other designers about solutions over the over there they're yours so before we get into all that we're gonna talk about some level design mindsets and difficulty curves so if you wanted to pull out your difficulty curve you probably start with something where the game gets harder when the player gets to further into the game and get a nice upward slope like that and if you're a masochist maybe you're gonna make a game get immediately hard and then stay just

super hard the whole time like Super Meat Boy or something like that I like this idea of I call it the the heartbeat curve so it's a gentle slope but it has a periodic spikes and dips in it I will zoom in here on that and the idea is you start out with and introduce a mechanic and it's a super easy to play level the player can't really fail they just get used to the idea then you start to twist the mechanic and add little changes to it and slightly challenge the player further along in the levels and then finally there's a big spike in the difficulty it's not terrible but it's there and the player gets a rush and then they accomplished and they beat the mid boss or the boss and it's a big spike there and it feels good and then you start over but it dips way down so the difference is really sharp and the player gets a big full release feeling and they feel like they're really accomplished something cool and then you introduce a new mechanic and the whole process starts over there so that's my heartbeat curve there's also a really good talk on the GDC vault for free

about the game called jelly splash they have a whole different take on the difficulty curve it's a mobile game it's really popular it's probably designed to teach you how to just vacuumed cash how to players wallets you should go look at it it's really smart so when you're thinking about difficulty curves there's the concepts of puzzle difficulty and skill difficulty so puzzle difficulty is the idea of how hard is it for a player to figure out what to do and the skill difficulty is how hard is it for them to execute it with their hands in the controls and you could actually probably plot both these two on two different types of difficulty curves for your game so now we're going to shift into design mindsets just some overviews of different ways to think about level design so that's Bioshock there of course and this is a idea of environmental stoic storytelling it's the kind of the idea of the player asking what happened here and then thinking of what happened there and there's a really good talk on the vault called what happened here it's

from 2010 you should check it out it's excellent another cool game that's really big with environmental storytelling was hyper light drifter it's just the idea of the player looking and them telling the story without being explicitly told what the story is so kind of related to that I'd like to think is I'm set piece design with the Call of Duty series and others you kind of take like a basic gameplay simple of shooting guys and maybe not a lot of enemy types but you really dress it up with these huge environmental set pieces the Golden Gate Bridge and America explodes that kind of thing and it really adds a lot of flavor to what would be kind of a normal kind of game play so another type is what I like to call transcendent level design I really like shoot-'em-ups and in bullet hells there's like these curtains of bullets and I talk to a player hit a really good quote he said bullet holes are like that moment when a parent chaos becomes perfect order in your mind it's just a different way of thinking and

related to that is racing games you give them like rez or a thumper or the wipeout series and one of the games in the wipeout series wipeout fusion even had a mode called the zone mode where you have to loop the levels as long as you can getting faster and faster it's just a different way kind of building a levels and the final design type is mechanics driven or modular which is the one I'm going to focus on the day that Super Mario Galaxy there I mean look at that there's just like so much going on right you can interact with all of it there's the lily pad the water the bumblebee powerup the 1up you're probably thinking about hopping on that flower in the background the purple thing right it's all really cool stuff and there's a lot of games like that Super Monkey Ball has some cool a whole bunch of puzzles like that from the Rayman series the new new stuff there's like those little fireflies to grab the lily pads to hop on everything's interactable and it's really interesting so on my own game there this is our upcoming game piggy ball if you look there's bowling pins conveyor belts cue

sticks there's a lot of stuff going on it looks really busy but the player gets introduced to these slowly and this sort of game just lends itself to lots of levels and lots of mechanics because you want to introduce all these mechanics nicely here's marble saga Corrine pop I mean look there's scissors in the background they get a level right there's that diamond there's pinball bumpers here's APIs cape - there's that cool silver slope your eyes drawn to then there's a little gold pickups crates the Apes they all get their levels and they all get slowly introducing these huge games so I'm talking about introductions and not tutorials this tutorial sound awful right you put that at the beginning of the game and everybody hates it hopefully you guys don't even have to do that you should be able to introduce mechanics slowly and flesh out the mechanic and give it its own nice little area in the bigger level or its own little level this is Super Mario Galaxy 2 this is the flow third level it's actually it's far into the game its

world 2 area - it's a whole little mini game of tilting the controller it just makes the game feel so much more polished if you give your mechanics some room to breathe between all the other stuff you got going on just do a nice introduction ape escape 2 is another favorite of mine here's the super hoot mechanic so you spin the right thumbstick really fast and you can actually run up some bills sharp slopes so that silver slope on the other screenshot this whole level is the level that introduced the super mechanic in its all this Spanish tile and so now it's a it's a nice area to play in it's the whole levels built around it but from then that point on any time you see those slopes you know what to do you're like okay great I got this super mechanic I'm going to use it brings back around our own game that piggy ball that we're working on so the gameplay mechanic starts with what if pac-man could get fatter while you ate then it ends up kind of turning all

the levels into a bit of a puzzle I had to do an actual pac-man homage of course so you but in this game you can barf on the ghosts and either skin off it's cute gross right it's not terrible okay so um it's we start with that and you actually so you still have to eat all the balls in the level and but now you can get stuck in the maze and there's a lot of bars and then some that's in some parts but then we expand to that so I'm going to walk you through a couple of the cool mechanics we introduced in there so in world 2 there's an idea of the polarity cats and they are like lucky cats but there's a gold one and a black one if you break the gold one you just smash it apart and you can pass through that that spot if you break the black one it explodes and hurts you so we give this the load the player and ice a little play around with the damage in this level doesn't affect the end goal so they're free to goof off with it and if you notice what happens is when you break any of the cats they flip polarity Gold goes to black and vice versa we do that because then later on of course we want to introduce we want to get into

more interesting levels so this is like a looping level where they on a track and the cats are blocking off these balls that you have to eat as you pass it around and you keep eating balls you're getting bigger and bigger and at some point you're gonna run into a spot that you might have screwed up and caused the black cat to be in your way so that's more of a like a puzzle level but again we introduced it nicely before so the player could get their mind around that in the game there's these silly little creatures the pill bugs and they cause you all kinds of grief there's all kinds of different types of them this is a glutton pill bug and he loves to eat so we basically make sure that you start out with a level you're sure to build a beat even though it's strange and confusing you perturb the balls they hit the conveyor belts and the glutton blood gobbles them up turns out he turns into a giant bowling ball of sorts you know what the bowling ball is at this point in the game but you never seen him before but you know you can't get through bowling pins without something and there you go you're able to solve it later on we get into really

big complicated levels but you know what all these mechanics are as a player the players in the middle the glutton bugs on the right and then we've got super kites on the Left which you have to be fat enough to break their spiked walls there's bowling pins there's jelly blocks there's barf goblins all that makes sense once you play the game so you're trying to get into the gut and beg there but you can't reach him yet you're eating the jelly jelly books and you're going really fast and you make it - oh the barf goblins I can barf on those they love it it doesn't don't worry it's fine they love that so and then they fly away and you can get into where they were blocking off some balls and then you get bigger and you get into more and more sections and the player can kind of like red paper clip their way through the levels so all this is possible because of the level editor in the game which we do ship with the game I love the Mario maker I thought it was great I thought I'd had a few little UI problems which I tried to address but we try to make our level editor super nice there's our object palette it's very inviting and basically you're able to real easily play around with goof-off

with all these weird new mechanics we got in the game you can share your own levels with friends you can share them with the world daily feature levels all that kind of cool stuff there's beer I'm sure we'll have to write that or somehow for kids but the it's there's consequences when you drink the beer so hopefully we'll be okay so we're gonna talk about how methods we've looked at to organize all this stuff in the game before we get to that though let's assume for it together that better tools are gonna help you make better games right I'm sure somebody can make a house without a hammer and a saw but it wouldn't be great right it'd be better with tools the same thing here you're probably using unity or unreal or something like that to help you along but consider that you might even want to write some own custom tools for your game even if you're a small studio so one the easiest thing we can all use this paper right the cool part about paper is is 2d so if you're making a 2-d game you can rearrange things and really easily

balance things that's great but it's hard to share you can't Road over the Internet it's not computer searchable it's not a deal but I'm sure we've all started there I talked to a rad dude Morrison he's working on a upcoming puzzle game called semi spheres and he used paper to balance his game he actually printed screenshots on his business cards and we're able to lay them out and on the in rearrange his levels that way the problem of course is when he adds new levels he's got a reprint his cards again to keep going so he ended up digitizing that in a program that's free that you guys could use called Inkscape and he's got all his little slides and levels there that he can rearrange now and look for a better difficulty curve I like to know what's in my levels because we got so many levels going on I want to see what's going on so early on I tried using Windows search like that folder search function that we all have access to and it actually works it's not the best thing but way you got to do it basically is have a level format that's text-based if you have objects that have

a word that you can search on and then you just tell this index to build you have to rebuild the index on that folder it does work but it can take hours to rebuild all that kind of stuff so then if you change the levels you have to rebuild the index again so it's not ideal but it's but it's there and it's free if you have Windows now something I hope everyone's using if you have any number of things to keep track of it all is some sort of online Docs or sheets method there's Google Docs and Google sheets there's a really powerful and really useful this is a screenshot of our just a little clip of our world where we keep track of the world the level file names the level titles the goals and the medaling times on getting gold and silver the problem with Google Docs is that you've got to update it I don't know about you but I get a little lazy and then I have another designer that lives in a different state and he's supposed to see what I'm doing and vice versa he doesn't know was updated it's critical you should still use this but it has some problems in terms of use so

I talked to another designer I think he's here at the show Austin Borden a Traer sloth they're making a big puzzle game on mobile called King rabbit has 512 levels and they use it to see what kind of mechanics they're introducing for each world real simple real nice but it definitely helps them out now unity analytics you probably are using something like that I talked to a different designer and he is using his own custom system for analytics that sounds intimidating but it's not that bad Stuart Denman is working on a puzzle up a new puzzle game called tiny bubbles and where you were able to pop the little bubbles to create this chain reaction to solve the puzzle he still stores his analytics like most of us but instead of a funnel which is kind of junk in terms of seeing what's going on he plots his own map and he stores the the number of times their money quits the level and the number of times they had to replay it to beat it look at that gorgeous 'no stake it in

you can see exactly what's going on in his game the red are problems or are they take control of your difficulty curve maybe he wants those spikes there but he knows that they're there now it's really cool to see Stuart's at the show as well his agains games coming out in a little bit you should check it out they're now an older game I talked to the guys that did where's my water with Tim FitzRandolph and they used paper way back then but it served them pretty well they would print out screenshots of the words my water puzzles and rearrange them as they needed a balance but they also did this really cool solution where they had multiple designers working on Hardware on iPhones and iPads and this the devices could look at a shared Dropbox folder and they get hot change little level fixes without going through the entire build process which is kind of a pain in the butt for mobile and multiple designers could work off of all this together that's something to think about he said it was a little janky but it worked in our own game pickleball we do

have the level editor and we've now got an in level editor searchability for all the objects and mechanics we have in the game and you could search for that glutton pillbug now and it filters all the levels that contain that one object and then you could also filter by world by goal type or anything like that so I'm here's another one where you could actually filter and combine the filters together to even see more of where the levels line up together so i'm working with john meister from supersoul he's in Kentucky and I'm mommy's best in Indiana and we're working together on the game and he's the one that implemented a lot of these cool features that I requested the other thing he changed was we now have Google sheets export so a whole problem about being lazy about not updating your level data is now gone because we get fresh level data as we build the levels and what's cool is you

don't have to be in the game to see this anyone can just get in on the team could get on the Google Docs and just check out and see what's in the levels and you can even look at this heat map of objects in the levels if the way they built that was through as the levels are loaded they would count up all the objects in the level and the level data and then stored out to an XML and then parse that it really wasn't that bad and John Meister's here at the show as well talk to another designer Ian Stalker of the escape goat series he had this really cool grid arrangement tool his leveled where the players play through the game to find levels this is a little sketch it was a 2d grid as the player made their way through the game so he made this extra little tool it wasn't terrible where there's the live part kind of in the middle and he could drag-and-drop levels into there and rearrange that based on play test feedback to get a better feel for how players were having problems or drop levels that weren't working but he had control over that really easily rather

than just having it hard-coded in or something I talked to another team this little indie team making this game called candy crush saga uh-huh Jeremy came from King he gave a talk a couple years ago on how candy crush saga was built and there's some really good nuggets of information inside there they have an internal tool called the level library and there they store the screenshots the designer and the difficulty rated by the other designers of that level and they can rearrange the levels as well but it gives them a little leg up on what they think it's going to be like for players at the end they also use Google Docs they it's a they have a beat chart for where they're deciding to introduce new mechanics there I'm not sure Jamie's at the show there but he was a really nice guy and you can contact him for any questions as well based on his talk there but I thought it was neat that even they use this kind of thing Katherine Neil gave a really cool talk called for win spreadsheets and flowcharts aren't enough it's actually talked about

tools for game design not really production but it was really interesting well and that's another one that's free on the vault you're probably asking like oh gosh is my game even need this well I like to think of if you have more mechanics or levels that you can count on two hands and you've got at least two people on your team in different areas you should be keeping track if it's somehow not scribble down on a piece of paper so that both everybody can be on the same page so we talked about the level design mindsets the difficulty curves and the heartbeat idea and about making custom tools themselves and right now you could be using spreadsheets you could use Inkscape I didn't talk about Trello but I'm sure a lot of you know about it but you could be using that to keep track of things and it's nice to rearrange there's paper there's even window search but hopefully you guys gonna think about the idea of doing some custom tools for yourself even on your smaller teams and how it could help you out how many think outs for mommy's best games that little URL there in the

middle links to all the information in the talks are you covered and piggy ball is on fig it's like Kickstarter but only for games if you guys could back it I'd be eternally grateful and thank you and afterwards we're gonna all the level designers gonna go over to the Marriott Marquis and the lobby and hang out for a little ball while if you want to chat and talk and if I anybody has a question into a question yes so I was wondering if you could talk about any mishaps that that you had happened with your mechanics and levels before you had your organization method set like any problems that came from not having these tools yet right yeah so for any problems what did these all these tools solve we've been working on pickleball for five years it's a big action puzzle game

I lost track of mechanics there was gameplay objects that it forgot I didn't even have or didn't even use and I found them it was that's a ridiculous example but it's true the big thing you should be able to get out of this is difficulty balancing like I said take control of your diffic golde curve so that should help yeah hi good talk by the way thanks I'm student right now for game design and I was curious if you're just using all these different methods for building your whole design or are you actually making like say a full game design document for your games and then using these as add-on additions my method is ad hoc and so I do start with a game design but then I get a lot of ideas from iteration with tools and I always say you're gonna you're gonna make an interesting game out of different tools so whatever custom tools you'll have you'll inter end up with something different so they go to for the media they go together like you I

can't imagine planning something and sticking to it a hundred percent all the way to the end that sounds incredible so that's what I got me it's a mixture okay thanks yeah thanks for talk there's really interesting my question is with so many different game mechanics and introducing those and the interactions interactions between them when you're adding new mechanics and all the possibilities how do you explore those the different possibilities and if new people join the team how how do you convey them efficiently to the new members how do we introduce how do we decide what new mechanics are what and where they go well first of all everybody that joins a team that's on the production side should be playing the game so that that should get them into something and then where the new mechanics go it like it comes down to what kind of physical work the player is going to have to do like to understand

that new mechanic so it's like breaking a thing like those polarity cats they're in world two because all you got to do is just break a thing and then your mind has to understand what they do but like that glutton bug you have to like feed it and then think of where it goes and then take it there so I would say it's combined with that balancing your puzzle and skill difficulty for those who are kind of like magnified suddenly I think that mechanics should go further into the game for what you're expecting out of the player thank you yep thanks cool thanks guys [Applause] you