Ten Principles for Good Level Design

[Music] hey everybody y'all having a good GDC thus far awesome thank you ever so much for sticking around for the end to see my my little presentation that's super good of you I've been out I've been authorized by the event coordinators to warn you that they've given me this laser device to blind anyone whose mobile phone goes off so if you could please turn your phone's off also you'll probably be receiving an email requesting feedback on this presentation please feel free to to fill that in I'd love to hear what you think unless you think it's bad in which case I wouldn't and so with that without out of the way I should bring I should begin my presentation so for those of you don't know me I'm Dan Taylor I've been in the video game industry in various capacities for over 15 years now and

I've had the awesome privilege to work at great studios like Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Electronic Arts and Vancouver rock star and Ubisoft and I'm currently working as a senior level designer for Square Enix at their studio in Montreal which is the place is famous for Lumberjacks poutine and this lady Celine Dion who I think is the mayor or the queen of Montreal or something it's it's also where the new hitman is being made and I've been tasked with running the level design on that which is super super exciting and when I found out I was working on such a such a revered franchise I was reminded of the graphic novelist Paul Pope and what he said when he was given carte belongs to do whatever he wanted with Batman he said they were working on such a cool franchise was like being handed the keys

to an extremely hot car now you can either drive it very carefully make sure you don't scratch the paint or you can take it out onto the highway and open it up and see what it can do and I figured that if I was going to take hitman out onto the highway because if I had some kind of map so I didn't get lost my new era I was going and it just so happened that before I landed at square I was putting together a series of best practices for next gen level design which was kind of helpful and I found myself looking to classic design principles for inspirations I often do in in situations like this particularly the work of this guy dieter Rams so for those that you don't know dieter Rams he was the chief design officer at Brown in Germany over 30 years his product design has been a major influence on people like Jonathan Ive who does all the Pradas EIN for Apple and in the 1970s he published a paper called ten principles of good design so

good design is honest good design is aesthetic good design is as little design as possible and so on and so forth and whilst this works well for minimalist product design it's not really applicable to game design or level design but I thought it might be possible to to do a similar set of guidelines for level design so I started to put them together before I get going I'm gonna make a quick apology there's gonna be a lot of interdisciplinary crossover in these principles so it's more than just level design it's it's mission design its narrative design its mechanic design and I think this is important because a good level designer should really be well-versed in all of these fields so they can take a holistic approach to the design of their levels also despite Charlton Heston dressed as Moses in these slides these are not

rules that are written in stone they're just guiding principles they might under eight undereducated opinion they've been created - they've been created to prompt discussion to shed a little bit of light on the black art of level design and hopefully help some people create some kickass levels along the way so now we've gotten that out of the way let's start with the first principle which is that good level design is fun to navigate now just reversing a level presents the player with many different gameplay vectors there's observational which is the the act of surveying one surroundings strategic the act of processing your observations into a plan and then there's navigational the the active action traversing the level itself and for a smooth and enjoyable experience the player should always know exactly where to go which is why it's important to develop a consistent visual language that clearly guides the player through

the critical path now different games use different methods to do this but it usually comes down to the use of the lights geometry color and animation a good example of which is Mirror's Edge so a Mirror's Edge these is all of these things to create fantastic clarity and flow if you look at this slide it's pretty easy to work out you have to climb up the red crane run along the red crane jump onto the red pipes run along the red pipes and then jump onto the conveniently placed soft squishy object just on the right but the important thing to note here is the difference between intuitive to navigate and fun to navigate what the player doesn't notice in the screenshot is equally important so the hidden messenger bags the speed path will give you achieve Menaul of these are put in there to encourage exploration which is essentially freestyle navigation and this helps drag depth and replayability in your levels also in contrast for this point

sometimes it's good to throw in a little confusion now Modern Warfare 2 does this particularly well in its favela level it's highly memorable for its hectic and intense gameplay you'll set it set in a Brazilian favela it's a tight twisty maze there's no clearly obvious path through it enemies are coming from all sides they're coming from behind they bring bursts calles II into the level design with enemies attacking you from above is it easy to navigate through this level absolutely not is it fun yes it is and by carefully throwing in some well considered confusion to the mix trout have created a really good sense of drama attention in this level and speaking of drama the second principle is a good level design does not rely on words to tell the story one of my mentors once told me that a good story or a good piece of communication is like a broken

circle and you give the player this circle and it's down to them to fill in the gap now the trick here is if you make the gap too big the player won't be able to fill it in and he'll feel confused and patronized but if you make the gap too small you'll fill it in too easily and he'll be bored and he won't feel challenged so how do we do this in terms of level design well there are three types of narrative at work in a games level there's explicit implicit and emergent explicit narrative is anything that's explicitly call out to the player through cutscenes or text or spoken dialogue or any written indicated here written content that he or she finds and it's this that creates your circle implicit is anything that the player figures out for themselves by looking in the environment and I'll go into this in a bit more detail in a

second an emergent is the story that the player makes up in his or her own head now pregnant the first type of narrative is pretty straightforward but it's the other two types implicit and emergent that create that crucial gap in the circle so how do we do this in the level well the best way of creating implicit narrative is a technique called Mis on scene which is been used by stage and cinema for many many years and it's the art of telling the story through the environment and I believe that some Studios call this environmental narrative now so for me the master of implicit narrative is Bioshock so if you look at these pictures here you'll see there's water on the floor which is kind of bad if you're in an underwater city there are balloons on the ceiling which means there was a party recently there are creepy masks which make you think what kind of party was this and there are drinks have been left abandoned so clearly something went

wrong and people left in a hurry what I find particularly interesting about this picture is the massive big sign on the side which clearly says that it's New Year 1959 which tells you the exact date that everything went wrong but also even though it's almost the 60s the death or of this environment is very much in the forties which creates an odd visual disparity and makes the player feel uneasy now it's very important you should design your levels to give your world artists the opportunity to tell this visual story but creating emergent narrative is not such an obvious task because the level designer doesn't actually create it he merely enables it by providing the player with choice so hitman is actually a great example of emergent narrative as there's plenty of choice so you can use any kind of game mechanic you like to kill your mark you can poison him with a syringe or you can poison their food you can use combat

mechanics either go Ross and you with a fiber wire or filling him for the bullets you can even use the physics to kill him by pushing him off a Ledge or by pushing something heavy onto him and this is freedom of choice and emergent style that's great for allowing the player to fill in the gap in your circle in fact it hit man you can even go in dressed as a chicken guns blazing I think you'll absolutely everyone in the entire level or you can sneak through the level undetected dressed in your immaculate black suit kill only the mark and leave through the front door before anyone knows you're there getting that perfect silent assassin rating which is great but too much choice can leave the player confused and in need of guidance which is why the third principle is the good level design always tells the playout what to do but never how to do it the player needs to be no doubt as to

what he or she has to do when they go through your level and you should provide them with clear objectives so wait points other navigational aids etc but it is possible to create compelling challenge through obfuscation of the details that is to say by providing nebulous objectives so keep your guidance concise and clear only give as much information to the players as is absolutely necessary but make sure you provide multiple paths and styles of approach so Skyrim does this very well because it's open-world nature particularly the Dark Brotherhood missions which are kind of like a tolkien-esque hitman they tell you exactly where you can find your mark and exactly who they are they even appear as a mark on your compass but it never forces a player to use a singular technique to carry out the execution in fact if you look at the level design for the Dark Brotherhood missions very often specific alternate methods of execution have been set up so there'll be an arrow

a bow rather and a sheet of arrows on top of the ledge so you can strike from a distance or there'll be an opportunity to kill the kill the target silently when they leave the crowd and go to a secluded spot so as well as not forcing the player what to do it's important not to punish the player for improvisation if the player does something that you don't expect you shouldn't you shouldn't chastise and you should design it into your game and encourage the player improvisation and all this ties in with the emergent narrative that I was talking about earlier so veteran game designer mark Cerny tells us that the player should be presented with concurrent objectives that can be completed in any order he or she wishes furthermore on completion of one of those objects is the player should receive a reward which either makes the other objectives easier or modifies them in some way and you can

see you can see this at work in Ratchet and Clank on which Cernan consulted whereby if you complete the first planet 3 or 4 planets become opened up to you and you can complete them in any way that you like and once you've completed one of the planets you get a new who gadget or weapon that lets you open up new and alternate paths on the on the other planets and it's this constant flow of gadgets that keeps the player engaged as he learns to use them which is why good level design constantly teaches the player something new now previously when I rehearsed this presentation this is the spot where I do my Yoda impersonation to keep everyone awake but it always goes down like an absolute LED balloon so I'm going to spare you my bad Yoda and instead I'm going to tell you about a book called as a theory of fun by Rafe Koster in this book rate Acosta says that the

human mind enjoys processing patterns for storage and retrieval later and a lot of the fun in playing games is derived from this pattern analysis if this pattern analysis ends too soon this processing stops and the enjoyment ends so how do we prolong this enjoyment through good level design well least 11 annual game should introduce showcase or subvert a key mechanic now again holistic design of all other levels in your game is important for this to work because you have to pace it out throughout the entire game the best example of this constant teaching is any game in the Zelda series so when you get into a new dungeon in any Zelda game you pick up a new piece of equipment and each room in the dungeon teaches you a different way to use that piece of equipment then the final boss in that dungeon tests your mastery of the piece of equipment before it even lets you out of

the dungeon on top of that when you get out into the open world you'll constantly ask - to learn new ways of using your equipment to access hidden areas and find all of those heart containers and large rupee chests and so on and so forth but it doesn't stop there even the game's final boss usually requires the player to use every single bit of equipment in an unusual way and this is quite similar to the loop that Bethesda used to pace their games which is learn play challenge surprise they'll teach the mechanic to the player explicitly then they'll provide a safe area with no threat and all the toys that the player needs to kind of muck around and play with the mechanic then they'll bring in some threat or or a compelling objector to challenge the players mastery of that of that mechanic and then just when the player is feeling comfortable they'll do something crazy

to surprise him and this is why the next principal it's a good level design is surprising now this may seem pretty obvious but a lot of designers forget about this and by surprising I don't mean these you just fill your level with loads of monsters jumping out of closets one run says that you need to keep everything fresh by not falling into a routine now I'm sure all of you are super familiar with the the classic rollercoaster pacing method which is used to pace pretty much everything in video games so you have steadily increasing crescendos of intensity punctuated by troughs of slightly lower intensity so as not to desensitize the player and this pattern is repeated throughout all the levels and Terrill mechanics in most games almost to a

fractal level and it's my belief that if you do this in a game it becomes predictable pretty fast so the Alex man Rika who was formerly the creative director at relic wrote a paper on gamer sutra in which he explained that fun is actually created through uncertainty and by constantly flipping the player in and out of his comfort zone you can create quite a lot of fun and the best way to do this is to be subversive to take an existing game design paradigm like the aforementioned pacing and flip it my favorite example of this is the issue mirror level in Dead Space 2 is everyone here played Dead Space 2 well a surprise not as many people as I thought that's upsetting to disobey Tuesday's there's anyone here going to plague database tubes I'm about to spoil the issue mirror level that's that's a shame anyway so when you get to the issue

mirror and dead space to the issue mirror is the spaceship from dead space one you've been fighting Necromorphs all the way through the game and you get to this you mingle this especially from test base one this is gonna be full of nasty aliens and you get in nothing okay that's a bit strange five minutes later it's level okay right bring on the aliens nothing ten minutes into the level still no edits and it's not until 15 minutes into the issue mirror level when you reach the spaceship central transport corridor there's massive great big monster drops from the ceiling and at this point you're ready to wet yourself figuratively speaking obviously and this is quite cool so they've disrupted this Pacey I'm quite lucky to know the producer on that level and when I found out he was responsible I was really excited how did you how did you work out this this paradigm shift ISM brilliant did you watch a lot of horror movies did you read take a course on horror

writing did you do loads of tests and do psychometric analysis how did you do it because well no we didn't really have any choice because we didn't have time to build any new any new level geometry so he had to reuse the old issue Miura and we weren't allowed to change it because that would mess with the Canon and the the game director was very insistent that we showcased his massive big monster and he wouldn't let us use any other monsters as the first encounter in the level so I didn't have a choice and it kind of worked out quite well because this restrictive design was really force and force my friend to take a take a big risk with the pacing and taking risk is important if you want to stand out now it's easy for me to stand up here and talk about taking risks actually now it's working it's important for me it's easy to stand up here and talk about taking risks but we

all know the problem with risks is that they are inherently risky it's the designers responsibility to manage to this risk sensibly so design your levels diligently on paper but don't forget that what looks good on paper doesn't always work once you get it into the game and oddly enough for the reverse of this is true sometimes some really ridiculous ideas actually work very well when you test them in game it's absolutely crucial that if you've got anything risky you gray box it and test it as soon as possible otherwise you'll risk getting it cut as your game purfles toward into next milestone and your producers looking at miss crazy crazy are daring thinking it's a bit risky I'm gonna count it so on Medal of Honor we we designed these awesome little kind of grenade puzzles where you could access hidden areas of the level by chucking grenades down vents and flushing Nazis out of otherwise impregnable bunkers unfortunately very late in production we hadn't proved it out it wasn't quite working it ended up getting cut just because we hadn't tested enough we haven't tested it early enough and this

was a big shame because it would really help towards a feeling of player empowerment and the next the notice is my favorite slide the next nice principle is the good level design empowers the player the 18th century poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and for those of you that were born after 1985 that's him in the picture Goethe said that you should dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men and I think this is the 18th century equivalent of the phrase go big or go home and as the level design you should definitely do this you should assume the mundane you should never give you a player shopping list in missions because essentially video games are escapism and why would people want to escape to somewhere that they could go in real life because quite frankly real life sucks as anyone here

seen the TV show Charlie broker's games white Wow almost as many people who played database to you should see this it's it's actually the most entertaining piece of TV ever made about video games in my opinion anyway and it's on youtube but anyway in this TV show the Irish comedian Darrell O'Brien explains why he's never got to the third island in GTA 4 because there's this mission where he has to drive all the way across town in rush-hour traffic and he has to drive carefully so as not to upset the police and he has to go through a toll bridge he even has to pay the toll history I've carefully through the gates and not crash it can't speed through other person's upset the police but he gets caught by the police he gets arrested need to go right back to the start and do it again and he was playing this one afternoon he thought hang on a second I can drive in rush hour traffic in real life what am i doing they're playing in this video game so he just stopped and he's never got to the last island of GTA in most games players want to be

badasses and a title that does this really well is Red Faction gorilla and it really delivers the fantasy of being a martial rebel it doesn't give you a mission to drive across a tall bridge it gives you a mission to destroy a toll bridge using a sniper rifle that vaporizes metal well this is super super empowering as it lets the player see his his effect on the environment straight away and the key gameplay mechanic in Red Faction really helps us the destructible terrain so it's kind of an unfair example but whilst as mechanic does help you don't need such an obvious mechanic to do this in your levels if if you design them to show the players influence I like the way that infamous does this so many missions an infamous necessitate a comic choice of some sort you can either be good or you can be evil when you complete the mission and in fact this this karma

system is periphery active throughout the entire open-world environment for example there are bombs throughout the town which you can either the defuse to save people or you can let them explode and absorb their power and become stronger but there's resultant collateral damage now a karma system isn't particularly special in a game there are lots of games to do it but what infamous does really well is the subtle ways in which it shows the consequence of your karmic choices so for example the citizens of the city the citizens of the city if you take good karmic choices the better you become the more they'll help you so they'll start cheering when you move past it or they'll start throwing rocks at the bad guys you're trying to fight and conversely if you were evil they'll start booing you in a kind of pantomime style and then they'll start throwing rocks at you which is a kind of nice little way of showing the the player these actions do have a consequence in Medal of Honor we put Allied hostages in

some of the levels that you can rescue and if you rescue these hostages they pop up later on in the level to help you out so depending on how you played some of the levels if you were a little more daring there'd be a little easier later on which leads me to the the next principle so a good level design is easy medium and hard now what on earth does this mean how can i level be easy medium and hard well I've got to confess that I've got a bit of a bee in my bonnet or an axe to grind or what-have-you with the standard difficulty select screen that you see in a lot of video games I think it's our cake it asks the player to make an arbitrary choice which will affect how the entire game handles for him/her with no knowledge of how his skill stacks up against the game mechanics why can't the player choosing game simply by playing the game I'm of course alluding to the use of risk/reward so this this works in terms

of level design by designing multiple pathways through your level so you always designed the basic path through your level to present an easy to medium challenge and then you have clearly called out high-risk paths with an obvious reward or conversely easier path if your main path starts get a little tough and it's important you do this to use the visual language that I mentioned in the first principle and the king of risk reward in games is burnout now in burnout on the tracks there's always they're always narrow shortcuts they're clearly more risky because they're narrow they or they're always cool out by a bright yellow barricade which is their visual language and they always provide a really obvious reduction in your lap time or some sweet air so you can get some boost there's no difficulty select screen in burnout because the players can select their own difficulty dynamically and this isn't just applicable to racing games you can

use a multi-layered approach in RPGs action adventures first-person shooters you can place a powerful weapon in a tricky to reach spot necessitating navigational risk you can place a dangerous enemy with a clearly call out flanking routes allowing people who skilled in stealth an opportunity to reduce the risk least eye paths can also be a puzzle requiring a little more cerebral skill to access for an example an object that became that can be seen but the root of that object is hidden or secret areas that are called out with a visual cue I still have a slight problem with flickering neon lights every time I'm near one I feel compelled to look for secret doors because I played too much doom when I was at university so games like like Dishonored uses layered approach to good effect they they fill the level with multiple paths from various styles and various aptitudes of

player and analyst these multiple gameplay layers also extend the replayability of their levels which makes for efficient design and good level design is efficient now this is classic dieter Rams a video game always has a very finite amount of resources where they whether that's the technical limitations of the hardware that you're developing on such as the memory or the pixel pushing power to the the real-world constraints slide K your production schedule the number of people on your team the scope of your projects and so on and it's a designer's responsibility to maximize the use of those resources and for level design this means not only using the whole animal nose-to-tail but doing it more than once and doing it quickly for this modular design is your friend a good level designer doesn't create a level it creates a series of modular mechanic driven encounters that

you can string together to make a level and another level and another level on top of this this technique also creates a series of familiar moments that the player can use to learn and master your mechanics I don't know if any of you've had a chance to check out the tool cases ship with the phaser games but these are extremely modular they're essentially like medieval Lego or post-apocalyptic Lego depending on which game you are playing with and it's through this modularity that such a relatively small team can create such a massive amount of content and also by applying simple mod modifiers to these modules is possible to create variations and keep things fresh by providing increased challenge and surprise modifiers are particularly important for creating bi-directional gameplay now your level artists through world artists are going to spend a lot of time making the levels of you design look beautiful when unfortunately

unfortunate reality is that most players will blitz through them in a matter of seconds now how do you keep your level office happy and get the most bang for your art buck well you need to reuse the nice now the most obvious way to do this is to make you'll play a back track a lot but backtracking is totally not cool what you do is dead is designed for bi-directional gameplay so what I mean by that is game play on the way there it's totally different to game play on the way back and a game series it does this very well it is halo so for example in Halo 1 the level 343 Guilty Spark is awesome for bidirectionality it begins as a search mission with exploratory gameplay and then when you unleash the flood all hell breaks loose and it's intense combat on the way back similarly in Halo 3 in the mission the arc you fight through a desert level on foot using a sniper rifle and then when you get to the mission to Apex you get a tank air dropped in and you can blast

your way out of a level in a tank totally totally different gameplay expanding on this principle further levels and in fact the entire game can be made totally non-linear a great way of doing this is to provide implicit objectives that require intuition and exploration to complete so the scales in Halo the contacts in Gears of War and the feathers in Assassin's Creed these were all designed to encourage nonlinear exploration and extend the gameplay with no extra hit production plus these are actually not great examples of nonlinear gameplay because it's very important that you don't create gameplay for gameplay sake just to pad out your game you need to keep nonlinearity relevant by incentivizing the player by calling out clearly the reward in advance the heart in the sonnet is a great great example of this in fact you should also try and tie these objectives into the main narrative thread there's

this awesome old Game Boy Advance game called Astro Boy or mega factor but does this beautifully by actually making replaying the levels of key narrative element once you finish the game and play through all the levels you're treated to a quite a disappointing ending but somebody appears and sends Astro Boy all the way back in time to the start of the game with all of the power-ups and he's collected he can then play through the game zapping backwards and forwards in time using all of his different power-ups to select the levels the feed monsters that he couldn't defeat before open up secret areas and ultimately get the much more rewarding true conclusion to the game so essentially what what this plot device does is massage the player into playing through the entire game twice which is pretty cool because when you do complete it the finale is really emotional which is what rule number nine

is the good level design creates in motion last year the US Supreme Court where they are bless their little cotton socks declared that gay video games were legally art which is ace according this is a dictionary art is the quality production expression or realm according to aesthetic principles of what is beautiful appealing or of more than ordinary significance now this is a kind of dry pragmatic definition of art for me from a purely subjective and personal standpoint I like to think of art as anything that's been specifically created to provoke an emotional reaction so paintings sculpture photography music movies all of these are created to encourage some kind of emotional response in their recipient this is particularly true for an interactive medium like video games now the most analogous form of Arts to level design

is surprise surprise architecture an architects have been playing with people's emotions for hundreds and hundreds of years and there are loads of great architectural theories that we can steal from them for example windows if windows were placed below knee height that's because the architect wanted to convey the feeling of power and voyeurism conversely if when there was a placed above shoulder height the architect wanted to invoke a feeling of persecution and imprisonment well I'm not entirely sure why an architect would want to do that unless he was designing a prison Architects make curved rooms with no corners to induce a feeling of womb-like calm they're buildings there are also a lot of classic level design tricks that you can use to create spatial empathy you can use tight corners to limit the player's field of view to keep them tense and suspicious of claustrophobic you can make your level twistin labyrinthian to create confusion and panic alternatively you can blow that space wide open to create a feel feeling

of isolation and epic scale even switching from narrow space to a large space is a great technique to force the player to look at a specific Vista to create a sense of wonder you can bring verticality into the mix to create a feeling of persecution by attacking the player from above a feeling of vertigo by making the players scale a high mountain or a high building or feeling of hope by placing a reward at the top of a tall building the the new Tomb Raider does this really well it goes from super narrow caves to wide open jungle and really leverages the space or lack thereof to create a motion and aside from spatial empathy when designing for emotion I personally find that the best technique is to work backwards so your starting point should be the desired emotional response you want to invoke from the player then you should drill down and select the spatial parameters the narrative elements and mechanics that you want to use to elicit that

emotion so if you want to make the player feel persecuted put an enemy AI into your level that constantly hunts him if you want the player to feel exhilarated engage them in a high-speed chase or a firefight in a large open space or an open road if you want the players feel a sense of urgency modify your core mechanics with some kind of time limit if you want the player to feel a sense of desperation give them an almost impossible goal and then save them at the last minute like company of heroes does in the current hand mission now this is an interesting mission for me because and this in this level of Company of Heroes you're asked to protect the town of Carentan against their Nazi invasion force until allied reinforcements arrive and so if you guys had thought the same thing that I did when I was given that mission objective I thought that's cool all I have to do is hold out for it time and then my reinforcements will arrive but company of heroes effectively lies to the player about the mission parameters because the reinforcements

aren't triggered by a timer they're triggered by is the number of soldiers you have left alive so they will only ever appear when you have two soldiers left well this makes the battle super super intense and in fact using the game mechanics like this to create a motion it's possibly the single most important goal of a level designer which is why the final principle is the good level design is driven by the mechanics now there's a I read this quote somewhere on the internet and policies to whoever I'm stealing it from because I couldn't find it again and I don't know who said it the quote goes the books let you imagine extraordinary things movies that you see extraordinary things but video games let you actually do extraordinary things and so above all else great level design

is driven by this interaction the games mechanics games game levels don't just provide the context or the setting for the mechanics they provide the very reality in which they exist now I'm going to apologize in advance for this next slide and for the slightly highfalutin word theory but I like to describe a games level as the metaphysical medium through which the gameplay is delivered so I'm going to expand on this by means of an analogy and I like to think of your video games a painting so the subject of your painting what you're painting those of you all gameplay mechanics such a game contains the composition what gives you all your subjects its context that's your narrative and your graphics the medium the actual oil and canvas that you paint your painting with is your games and level your level should be a game play delivery system whose primary

function is to leverage your mechanics to create the great experience topology architecture objectives interactions combat scenarios etc should all be designed to showcase your games mechanics now it's important to have a thorough understanding of your mechanics in order to do this but I appreciate this isn't always possible as your mechanics and your levels and being developed concurrently but you should always have a rough idea of the sort of systems that are being built conversely this can work the other way around if you have if there's something that you want this cool in your level talk to your lead mechanic engineer or your little gameplay designer to see if you can get a mechanic to support it in fact into the interdisciplinary communication between engineers designers and artists is absolutely crucial if you want to have a strong level design team my favorite game for one of my favorite games for mechanic's basic design is Deus Ex Human Revolution so the levels in Deus Ex they have multiple paths that

showcase the stealth mechanics and the combat mechanics they have specific moments for the player to use their augments so areas where you can use your Bionic arms to punch through walls you'll reinforce back to lift up heavy objects and reveal new paths through the level unsuspecting enemies who are standing at the bottom of a really tall building so you can use your Icarus drop to wipe them out in a really flashy way even the secondary missions have been designed to leverage the mechanics so my favorite one is is a mission where you have to stun somebody and then drag their body over a balcony to make it look like a suicide and this this highlights the the non-lethal takedowns the mchale air the body dragging mechanic and the ragdoll physics this particular mission is a really good example of creative reuse of the game's mechanics and when you start a showcase your mechanic system it's important you

don't just rinse and repeat the same little setup over and over again you need to find creative ways to modify these mechanics and keep them fresh the riddle of challenges in Batman Arkham City a really good example of this where the player has to use his equipment in clever new ways to unlock puzzles this is cool but it extends the playtime and keeps the player learning and the resultant cerebral gameplay fuels the fantasy of being the world's greatest detective rather than just a man in a cape who's great at kicking ass so that's the tenth principle for any of you who have fallen asleep during this presentation this is a good time to wake up because I'm about to recap and go through the entire 10 rules in one slide the first I'm going to take some water so there is again good level design is fun to navigate create a clear visual language but feel free to throw in some chaos good level design does not rely on

words to tell a story use implicit and emergent narrative rather than explicit good level design tells the player what to do but not how to do it use clearly communicated objectives the players can complete in any way or order they want good level design constantly teaches the player something new it keeps the player engaged by continuously introducing or subverting new mechanics good level design is surprising don't be afraid to take risks with the pacing aesthetics or any other elements good level design empowers the player videogames for escapism let the player feel the impact of his actions good level design is easy medium and hard use risk reward so that the player can set the difficulty dynamically good level design is efficient designed for modularity by

directionality and non-linearity and lots of other era tees good level design creates a motion it begins with at the end with the desired emotional response and works backwards to select the appropriate mechanics to elicit that response and good level design is driven by the game's mechanics above all it showcases the game's mechanics through the medium at the level to reinforce the uniquely interactive nature of video games and those are the 10 principles of code if anyone's got any questions I would be happy to answer them as long as they're not too hard hello

Hey thank you thank you thanks for the talk yeah well I'm wondering if instead we want to switch the end to good level design is written by emotion and fueled by the mechanics I mean if we look at the runaway hit of journey that just happened it's it's about the motion there it's what emotion is listen through the game in the player and the mechanics are all there to not empower but to help underline that emotion like the mountain level that it wasn't about making you feel great it was about making you feel horrible so you're just to make sure I understand your question is that it should be more about an emotional reaction than the empowerment I'm thinking that if we focus on the emotions that are coming through the player or we're trying to put into the level instead of focusing

on the mechanics then the mechanics will fall into place and we'll have much more emotional experiences I just want to know what your thoughts are I think because so focusing on the emotions rather than the mechanics so switching rules 9 and 10 essentially what you're saying yes yeah yeah yeah you can you can totally do that in fact it's kind of an odd order I tried really hard not to give these solicitors in order of priority even though I put what I thought was the most important one at the end but you can weight them however you like I think if you're designing your levels to showcase mechanics and you're picking the mechanics to drive the emotion you're kind of doing that already if that makes sense yeah definitely I'm just worried about putting too much of a focus on empowerment makes us tell a very certain type of story yes yeah yeah so I actually I put these together before I'd played journey which to tomatoes grace I

only played it a couple weeks ago and it was awesome which was great and I was sitting through the journey presentation which was also great yesterday and and I just saw my little design his presentation is kind of all about going in guns blazing and empowerment and and what my my friend's wife likes to call the most important boy in the universe syndrome where she thinks that most people play video games so they can feel that the most important boy in the universe but I think you could you could certainly twist a lot not twist but repurpose the empowerment principle to make the empowerment about being emotionally empowered so being being able to feel really sad or to it it's more about really delivering on the fantasy that you want the player to feel which doesn't necessarily have to be about being being he-man or being big in a big and powerful yeah maybe we want something more about an and emotional intelligence instead of just empowerment

but just something to think about thank you thank you I was just wondering how your those Commandments apply to the multiplayer aspect interesting not sure I kind of wrote those from a single-player perspective in mind but I would have to give that a little more thought I'm gonna defer that one and answer you by email to ping me an email I'll have a think about it and get back to you will do hi great talk thank you for coming thank you my question is based on a couple of your rules to me seemed to really encourage the player to take the time to figure out how to do things on their own yes and the downside to that is obviously that the longer the player is working at that the higher their level of frustration is climbing mm-hmm I was wondering how you approach actually

creating player frustration to enable them to actually you know discover new mechanics on their own instead of having text on screen to direct them I think it's very important to trust the player to work out your mechanics there's this constant kind of balancing act you have to do between the amount of work and effort you put into a certain part of your level design and the percentage chance of the player is going to work out different Studios have very different approaches to this I remember on Medal of Honor a lot of the secondary objectives which I put in to make the level feel more fleshed out and more interesting were actually turned into primary objectives because the gameplay director thought they were too cool to leave as secondary objectives which was kind of odd for me you know they're not too cool which is kind of strange yeah

does that answer your question yeah it's it's a matter of trust and balancing there's no easy quick answer for that I'm afraid sorry so I had a quick question about what you were talking about with efficiency specifically okay you mentioned that you you think that bi-directional levels are a very good idea I definitely agree but back when I was playing games such as like Halo one you know back in the day I all my friends would my half-life playing friends I didn't I was too poor to have a PC my halfway prank as they say they would say things like oh well why would you play a game with so much copy and paste level design so I was wondering like what is a good way to make sure you don't make the players feel like it's too repetitious if they're if you're

playing backwards in a level even if the gameplay is different I think there there are a couple of ways you can do this actually so in terms of the gameplay I've discussed I'm using a modifier to change their gameplay on the way back you can also do stuff with the lighting in the geometry so that it looks totally different depending on which direction you were approaching it from you can do subtle little things to make it all feel differently I think halo is it's possibly a dangerous example to talk about because there are some parts of the game which are beautifully bi-directional and there are other parts of the game with making me walk through the same copy-pasted level again and again again and I think one of the important things to remember between Halo and half-life is the fact that halfway took seven years to make I think of something like that so they probably have plenty of time to make lots of nice levels thank you hello um about your bit on dynamic difficulty yes

you brought in the fact that some games will hide special weapons for all sorts of little secrets yeah out of the player who wants to take the challenge further and search around mm-hmm these players who are more willing to to face more difficult challenges or most of the time rewarded with a weapon or an item that makes the game easier for them how do you keep that balance without without making without just making the game easier for those who have worked harder on it I think you need to be cognizant of that when you design the reward for the risk so for example if you put a big weapon in a game you need to make sure there's there's a reason for that to be used and if you want to put in an extra bit of risk reward it's important to balance it so that it doesn't break the overall difficulty curve and if you want

to be really pretty advanced to kind of fix a lot of patch a problem if you can dynamically up the not the ferocity that I said the level of the combatants that the player will face if he collects the rocket-launcher say for example thank you I've completely failed to repeat people's questions I do apologise for that I'll try and do that hi-yah so as the years go by I've noticed that obviously a games have been reaching a wider variety of audiences and I have some friends that they are not really gamers and they have started to play games like again recent games and a lot of them get lost a lot in environments they don't know like where to go they don't know what to do sometimes and for me it seems completely intuitive and people that do play game three years they notice they do so I think maybe some people they it's harder for them to understand maybe what to do in certain types of level design do you

think that because of this and since games are becoming like so big and lots more people are playing them is level design changing the way like our level designers working to make a different - yeah - be easier for more people to understand what's going on or is it just like people just need to adapt I don't know do you think that is happening is that an issue that's an interesting question so if I understand crap you're asking me if level design is being dumbed down to accommodate a broader audience of players who aren't necessarily familiar with the visual tropes to guide people through levels I think it is - to a certain extent but it depends on the type of game you're playing and a good example of this is the first Bioshock which have a little compass which would always point you exactly where in the direction you were supposed to go and the first thing I did was turn it off because it was annoying that I'm a G was probably quite helpful for a lot of players who weren't familiar with navigating a 3d space when

we put medal of honor together the navigability the levels is a really big problem we had we had signposts pointing in the right direction we had us had to go towards red objects you had compass markers your little compass which would point you in the direct net to go you had a bigger arrow on the screen that told you and you the the soldiers would lead you through the level so they'd always kind of leapfrog over you to guide you through that people still didn't know where to go so it's quite a complex quite a complex problem and aside from doing the dead space or perfect dark trick I've actually pinging it on the floor and showing that exactly where to go there's no way that you can really explicitly direct the play somewhere without breaking some of the immersion I think so again it's about finding a balance that's not really a great answer but hopefully that's okay okay a common problem that I

see in game design is whenever you're about to battle a boss but whenever I'm about to fight a boss you mentioned the surprise element in level design yeah but I find that I always know a boss is coming so I enter a room there's just full of ammunition and I imagine that you have to combat that because like I'm the kind of guy that's gonna just burn through my grenades and then I find the boss I'm like crap I should have save the grenades and so you're kind of combating against numskulls but also destroying that surprise element that makes sense yeah so that that's interesting I think what you've got there is is what I like to refer to as the designers curse so you're so familiar with the mechanics in the setup of the levels and level design that you know exactly what's coming you can preempt it I have this problem when I'm playing shooters whenever I walk into a room that's for the boxes that come up to about here oh yeah okay there's lots of cover in this room so

people are gonna pile in through the doors at the end so it puts me in a very different mindset somebody who looks nice so yeah I think it's difficult to design around that in it almost feels like the the opposite problem from the from the previous question where you've got such a pre-loaded knowledge that you can anticipate what's going on and that's why it's really important to to disrupt that kind of standard paradigm and the pacing in the layout I wouldn't be able to be a specific example of a boss fight that comes out of nowhere apart from that day of sex example that Thomas grip gave where you sneak around then suddenly as a cutscene that's a that's probably a bad example so I'll stop there so question a bit yeah thank you hi I was recently talking to someone at a bigger studio and they were saying a lot of their setups were driven by playtesting and the feedback that we're

getting so testers would score it based on how fun it was yeah a lot of the design was being change around because they were getting higher scores and certain setups like so they were taking out puzzles and whatnot and so I feel like it could have potentially taken away from the original creative direction what's your take on that so you're asking if consistently play testing and updating your game takes away from the initial creative vision that you had a - so this is this is an interesting personal point for me because whilst I think it's super super crucial to play through your levels in fact that I though I can level design to design all playing level design yeah I like a level design to having a kitchen and your level is like your kitchen when you're in your own level you know exactly where the knives and the forks and the spatulas and the spoons are but

when you cook in somebody else's kitchen it is quite stressful because I'm rich draw the spoons and I don't know where the pots are what's going on and I think you've always got to be bare in mind that the the player is going to be cooking in your kitchen so you've got to do the best - to make your kitchen kind of conform to kind of standard layout and not put your cutlery in the bottom drawer because that's weird but this always reminds me of this great alan moore quote who says that you shouldn't listen to what anyone says about your design or your critics you need to be your critic you need to know when you make something you know how good or how bad it is so as long as you've you approach your initial vision with a really well-balanced type of self-criticism you should be able to accommodate the the feedback you get and filter it out accordingly I think I've got time for two two more questions two

minutes two minutes left I'm curious I'm out of your entire career all the levels you designed what is the one that you're the most proud of or felt was the most successful my favorite level that I've designed is the opening level to Medal of Honor heroes - because it's the tutorial level and it was it was a very early FPS week and so we had this mandate to really clearly teach the the player they're kind of crazy new motion controls of the week but we didn't want to make it like a boring tutorial because it interrupts the flow of the level and he's very dull and we actually managed to create something that can capture the spirit of the the normandy beach landings from the original Medal of Honor it was but at the same time is the tutorials of explosions that didn't really have much of effect on the players health there were loads and loads of enemies but

they'd shoot at your your friends and not not at you but if you move past the enemies in a massive turnaround and target you so it was it was a really nice she taught it felt really exciting got really intense but it also did a really good job of teaching the player the core mechanics and every section of the the beach landing was has been designed very very deliberately to introduce a new mechanic and to teach her how to use it so it was a lot of fun for me to work on as well so I was quite pleased with that thank you enough to check that out I hope you enjoy it [Applause]