The Level Design of God of War

[Music] this is part of level design workshop there's a lot of great level design talks so please check them out all through the day you'll get a lot of experience from a lot of great people i hope to be one of them and we're going to talk about god of war today so it is a real joy to be here at gdc and actually uh we have a lot of learnings from god of war it's it's a very big game so we're going to try and compress a lot of it down into some simpler learnings for you today a little bit about myself i actually grew up in the australian games industry you can probably tell from my accent and other than spending my late teenage years working at a cheese store working in games is pretty much the only job i've ever had uh and so if you are just starting out with your career or just getting started in level design uh i put these kids games up here because it's a great way to get started and even though you might think that god of war would have you know tons of people from tons of

different uh huge aaa games which some some people do a lot of people actually come from smaller backgrounds and from kids games thq games even smaller games than that so if you ever wondering where to get started i always say just get your hands dirty and maybe i can show you some tricks today on how to do that in addition even though aaa games themselves can be very big heavy development experiences there's a lot of production behind them there's a lot of rules and level design tropes that i learnt on smaller games and i like to say that good design is effective at any scale and i hope that you can see how some of the tricks we're going to look at today work on big projects or work on small projects finally we we actually did have a lot of risks on this god of war game it's fabulous that it's come together so nicely we have a lot of fans which is always a great feeling but a lot of the rules i'll show you today are actually what i would call very traditional and uh there's some that have been successful on many games you know other than than god of war this talk is primarily about the

stonemason level you can see here this fabulous environment art is from isabella may it's one of my favorite levels in the game and it is about 50 of the way through the game so there's some minor spoilers but but nothing too major i won't go into anything too heavy but um to talk about how the item use works in the game and how the exploration works in the game i have to dive into it a little bit as we step through the stone mason level i'll keep coming back here a lot this is what i call the level design rule slide we'll come back here a few times and basically what we're going to do is go over six major rules from garter boards levels uh there'll be a little bit of time for questions at the end if we run out of time i can meet you at room 305 or 308 and we can keep discussing and my hope is that by showing you these rules and by showing you the stone mason level i can sort of use it as a microcosm for the level design of the game itself so we'll check back on this every now and then it's sort of the anchor to the presentation and then we'll go into the level i'll show you how the level

rules work out in practice and i'll show you some of the beats leading up to the level and you'll kind of get how the overall flow package is up from level to level so to get us started here's our first rule it's all about core pillars uh sometimes a contentious topic in game design some people really like to use core pillars some people don't i think they're great uh i like corporals because they let us know what to focus on you could sort of think of them maybe as a lens of focus that help us to all start getting thinking in the same direction together and we can't do everything in every game ever nor do we really want to right because if we do things with a bit of focus what we'll hopefully end up with is a few things that make the game really special something that actually helps to separate it from every other game out there and so you can think of the core pillars as creative building blocks and as we step through this talk i'll be going over core pillars a lot but before we do here's a quick history lesson god of war one two three and ascension the psp versions they all have core pillars that focus on a few key areas as well you might

describe them as combat platforming and puzzles and as you probably remember god of war was actually a game with a rail camera so it was often seen as this best-in-class bombastic action game action adventure game but by 2014 there was a very strong feeling both inside the studio and outside the studio that we needed to start looking at these core pillars and the anatomy that really makes up the game itself now for a franchise to switch up its core pillars is not the type of thing you want to do all the time right because what you're actually going to start to look at is are we re-evaluating the things that players find most fun about this game we're going to actually start unpackaging that i'm going to take all the pieces of the engine spread them out on the floor and see how they all fit together so with that in mind corey barlog our creative director and a few key team members sort of siphoned themselves off for a little while uh and they had the goal of creating a new set of pillars the three pillars that they came up with and i won't step you through the full process of how this was generated but they were very successful were

combat narrative and exploration and for level design this is a very big change it's great it starts to give us a lot of things to start focusing on but it actually also starts tapping into a lot of things that we sort of lack expertise in at santa monica studio but it's a good opportunity to start thinking in new terms and how we take on modern design challenges can't keep doing the same thing forever so how do we start thinking with a new lens of focus you can start asking yourself all right well what would combat 2.0 even mean how does this work with a new camera how do encounters work how do we build fight spaces uh sure a lot of people say they want to be a modern narrative game but what does that even mean how do you tell stories what are the components that come together to make that that happen and a lot of people think of exploration just in terms of larger spaces but how big is too big how wide is too wide what do you even do other than just exploring or roaming and of course at the center of all of this you have kratos and atreus

you know trying to tell a father-son story so you're trying to take combat narrative and exploration as your first pillars of focus and at the center of it you're trying to think of how this will all tie into a father-son story here's a quick version of vision book this is the one that corey put together i think it was fabulous in fact you can see all through the pres all through the book that combat narrative and exploration are very heavily represented in fact corey believed so strongly at these three pillars that you pretty much can't get a cup of coffee at the studio without having to look at it which is a particularly good way to start sort of brainwashing everyone and i know this is something that designers really respected the fact that cory stayed to these three pillars gave us some really strong anchors through the project that we could work on so with these three pillars in mind as i step through the presentation start to try to think about combat narrative and exploration a lot uh this stonemason level did take a long time to put together you know we we spent a long time tuning

and iterating on it even with these great pillars that we could focus on but the thing that's great about this level is when it came together it sort of became a fully architected expression that delivered on combat narrative and exploration and most importantly it proved to us that if you distribute those three pillars correctly you can actually deliver on the variety of pacing that we're looking to master not just an action game and not just an adventure game but a real mix of action and adventure right so let's take a look with a bit of a deeper dive how the game and how the level delivers on these three pillars start with the most obvious one combat well this of course details everything that is the most action focused component of the game it's the capital a in action adventure and that's everything from kratos's core attack loop to the ai he faces the upgrades that can be achieved and perhaps most importantly how a support character like atreus might contribute to that fight you can see here inside the category of combat there's actually a lot of sub archetypes it's not just arenas or fight

spaces there's also sort of more wide linear scenarios where you can take on the ai in more freeform ways down the bottom on the left there you'll see what i call a special rule scenario this one has a timer that sort of gets the variety a bit different from everything else of course you have boss battles you have lots of different things that come together to just make combat more than just fights right so the core pillar of combat is great it gives us a lot that we can start thinking about early on but what's really good about it is it has enough versatility that we can start to create sub-archetypes inside it it's a great place for level designers to start to put their focus and if you look at the mason level here you'll see that's pretty heavily distributed throughout the level exactly what you'd expect there's a lot of different fights that take place and they're paced out really well secondly narrative well you might not expect that out of a god of war game especially with the history of the franchise god of war has actually always had a strong narrative through it but it's never really been narrative gameplay so what we can start thinking about now is what is the father-son adventure that

kratos and atreus are actually going to go on it's the tone it's the level's purpose it's the overall law a good level has a story and has an adventure behind it right so we can actually start thinking about how to deliver on that again there's a few sub-archetypes of narrative gameplay that we can look into you've got cutscenes of course but we tried to innovate on this by having no camera cuts throughout these you can see there's sort of more slow paced sections where kratos and atreus can have conversations with one another down the bottom uh a lot of games are starting to become masters of this right now environmental storytelling how do we give the environment a center place how do we tie it into the overall law and of course you can see on the bottom right even atreus has little animations that we put in the levels to try and emphasize and accentuate his state of mind there's even little secrets that allow the player to find lord there's a lot of different categories inside that core pillar of narrative and that's great again like combat it gives us a lot of different versatility and variety that

we can create inside the level if you look at it from the top down perspective you might even be surprised how much narrative is inside this level and that doesn't even include the fact that you're in a level with a giant interesting looking fallen giant right so once again you can see we're able to get a lot of variety and density out of that sort of initial pillar of narrative and rounding out the three pillars is exploration and this is what i would consider to be the most complicated of the three pillars the pillar of exploration is is great it represents the desire for larger layouts sure it represents the desire for more wide linear spaces of course but it also represents the design shift in the camera the fact that you can actually move the camera around now means every space is more explorable than before there's a famous phrase taught to me earlier in my career by morgan jaffe which is camera is genre where you place the camera is possibly what type of game you are making right and when we shift the camera from a rail camera

game to a fully 3d game now we have very explorable game just through the perspective of the camera so you can start to once again break down exploration into sub archetypes and start to look at how the camera provides new opportunities it's more than just big spaces there's little puzzles that we can put all through the level now that we can aim the camera in different perspectives we have optional fights that you can opt into those are just great because they give you a bit of player autonomy and finally this level actually connects to the game's hub which is the lake of nine and we'll go into that a little bit later but it's a larger sort of discussion about how exploration and level to level flow works so once again you can see that exploration is pretty heavily represented in this level of course it does bunch up a little bit in the most uh explorable space which is the mason's uh mini hub right in front of his head but also if you look at the back end of the level it's more than just building big spaces we want you to seek out nooks and crannies in every room even if it's a more linear space or a load hallway

we want to fill that full of secrets lore additional moments and so forth so when you put it all together i think you have a level that accurately delivers on the three pillars combat narrative and exploration and if you use these correctly you can achieve the variety and pacing that i think we're looking to master a mix of action and adventure the stonemason level is sort of what you might call one of the more level designery levels as well right it's particularly good at this and it's not a full vertical slice and we don't treat every level like a template or anything like that but it was a particularly good level to get online early in the project because it really did prove to us that if you mix and match these three pillars together you can get a lot of versatility and you can get a lot of variety and this is in essence why i believe in core pillars so much when you go to design spaces front of mind for all designers should really be how do i use these how do i mix and match them how do i start to think about them to create a lot of focus and if you do this you'll end up with a

level that feels a game that feels very different from level to level but still feels consistent from the overall level to level experience so with that in mind we'll add rule number one to our deck and we can start to look into our next most important technique which is converting these pillars into recognizable metrics and that's where rule number two comes in early on in the project we had to make a decision about what type of construction of this game we wanted to use and we made the decision that we were going to be a very metrics focused game so we can start to think how do our core pillars and our metrics come together to help us architect spaces a lot of people talk about design metrics what does it even mean quick definition i like to think of metrics as just a design measurement that communicates gameplay if used correctly you should start to build a rhythm in your head as to what the different measurements mean and all games have this you know if you're playing tomb raider uh maybe jump heights and jump widths might be super important

if playing a racing game might be about widths of uh paths or you know where we go on-road off-road all these types of things really important for what type of game you're making so of course the first question you should be asking is how do we make metrics that emphasize and accentuate the core pillars of the game our task is to determine metrics that are most important for highlighting and promoting the goals of the game so with that in mind you can start to quickly rat your head once again through the core pillars of the game at a simplest level well for metrics for combat we don't want snags or frustrations okay how do we create a metric that creates that for narrative sure it's easy enough to say we want no camera cuts but how do we actually create a metric to deliver on that goal and for exploration this is a game without a jump button when you're looking around the environments how do we create more explorable spaces while also allowing you to scan the horizon and start to get a quick

snapshot in the back of your head as to what those metrics might mean if you get to a dead end and it doesn't actually reward exploration you can be bummed out not going to want to explore anymore right so those metrics start to put a lot of psychology in your head this here is one of our most important team documents it's called the level building codes and it was created by michael chang and james writing and it details all the metrics out in meters you can see here that kratos he mostly uses one meters two meters and three meters and we try to really stick to those values as much as possible even in more organic spaces you can see that he has five meters as kind of his drop-off heights and so forth and as we start to get more complicated all the different vaults and squeezes and wall presses all these things have very clearly laid out metrics so if done correctly the visual archetypes are established and layouts remain clear you're happy with the metrics they go into a test bed and you can examine them further here's a quick example as you run through keep an eye on the three meters

and we'll come back to that in a moment so it's pretty straightforward stuff you can see everything's nicely laid out it's easy to test that the animations are going to line up correctly and boom there's our three meter one right in front of us let's take a closer look at the three meter three meter boost is is i love this one it's really simple because it's a vault that kratos can do to get to an upper ledge it's not so high that you might feel like you're going to move to the next space or trigger the next cinematic or move on to like a big fight or anything like that but it is just high enough that it removes you from the planar space and it's perpendicular it's you know a very strong sharp edge and it's roughly at kratos's eye level so the three meter boost is great it can be used to separate the combat space a little bit it can be used to reward a secret and if used correctly it starts to build a rhythm in your head

as to what the role of the three meter boost may be there's a lot of other archetypes this is why people call metrics sometimes level legos or similar like that because when combined together they make a very traditional bsp layout or sheet layout as we call it this is the stonemason level early on and you can see that these metrics were very early attempts to start to see how these level rules may start to come together over here you can see that there's some early attempts to get combat spaces and combat metrics laid out correctly up the top you can see the early examples of volts and down on the bottom right you can see that these are some early attempts to start working out what is climatrix and climate animations might look like as we get further into development these metrics were actually pretty successful and so we started to look into more advanced ones over here you can see that we added little jump gaps this is maybe a little bit more rhythm that we can start to build into the nav metrics the environment artists told us that slopes were something that was super important to them based on their

research of the nordics so we started to look into what ik heights would be and how we could build with those in mind and finally a point of pride for me is you'll see over on the right hand side that initial metric that we created for the fight space has actually retained its design and even as it got a more sort of detailed pass it's actually held its structure that's spot on you know this is the value of laying it out correctly so when you step through the stone mason level you'll see there's a really basic core path and now we can start to think once again how all these metrics come together to make combat narrative and exploration here's our three combat spaces you can see there is a more wide linear space at the front of the level up the back we've got a more traditional arena scenario that takes place at the head where we can increase intensity and then actually uh on the back right there you'll see that this was a space that we also laid out to be another arena which is a bit too similar back to back right so we had to introduce a character there to spice it up and make it a bit more interesting

in terms of the narrative pillar you'll see that the mason himself is pretty much a perfect narrative set up it's a fallen giant whose you know last breath has frozen the entire world around him it's a great setup but despite what you may think we don't know every line of dialogue or every piece of of narrative that is written at the start of the project right so what we try to do is lay out the space so that there's tons of opportunity for banter or environmental storytelling or set pieces in general and that means that the writers can come in at different phases in the project and still make interesting moments between the characters and finally up the back there this is one of the cinematic transitions this was a very early attempt to try and work out how we were actually going to funnel you from game play into cinematics with no camera cuts in this example kratos uses a climb and that's a great way to limit his movement so that we can start to create blends between gameplay and cinematics and in terms of exploration you can actually see here this is where i showed you the jump gaps earlier this was kind of a failed experiment even though the level designer kaizen did an incredible job of this level actually we

found out that if you're a game without a jump button it's just not that fun to move around and lean into the nav so later on we actually swapped these out with little bonus puzzles that involved throwing the axe which we thought was a bit more in tune with the game's strengths rather than maybe its limitations so once you string it all together you have a layout that can actually fit all in maya which is great because we don't have camera cuts in this game so it's really important that we can actually fit it all in one scene and it's great for workflow so you can probably tell from how much i'm going into this that i'm really proud of how the level designer kai did with this if you strip away the production of the level there's a lot of really simple rules that make up this space they're not super fancy and they're not super complicated they're just a lot of repeatable metrics and repeatable pieces that come together to make an overall layout and ultimately it's the core pillars and those initial metrics that are the first building blocks of level construction if you know your core pillars and you

have a generally clear layout i believe you'll have a strong canvas for more complicated decisions right and if you do the groundwork to do that you can start to take on more complex things like variety pacing mixing it up all these things which brings us to our next set of rules achieving variety so i mentioned a lot that uh we're always looking for the mix of action and adventure right never leaning too hard into making the action fatiguing and never leaning too softly into the adventuring elements and since the game's been out for a while now we do hear from players that they feel like it has a good mix of scenarios including combat narrative and exploration which is awesome i'm really glad to hear that and you never know until the game ships right so when you hear that you're very relieved in some ways um and also players often tell us that they feel like it keeps moving from a moment-to-moment perspective that it stays fresh so with that in mind i want to detail two rules that i think are really important for achieving variety the first is that all levels sort of

promote or sell a major theme throughout the level i'm fond of saying good levels have a strong theme so put simply to create a theme or variety there has to be some kind of unique gameplay element something that acts as a start point or an inception maybe like a nucleus for an idea and our hope is that that will give us a breadth of different scenarios that we can create and once that unique gameplay element or that unique level toy or whatever you want to call it has been established it sort of becomes an anchor for the level if you establish it correctly in the level and you teach it correctly then we can be confident that we can start throwing more complex scenarios at the player and more complexity and more variety at the player through the course of the level and once you've got enough of these scenarios strung together you got a theme right so that brings us to our second rule all critical path levels unlock a new ability

put simply these are distributed about every 90 to 120 minutes or so and as above these are the unique gameplay elements that drive the theme throughout the level most importantly since a new one's unlocked every 90 to 120 minutes it helps the level to make it feel different from the one before it and it helps the level to make it feel different from the one after it it's a lot of good variety it prevents a lot of blandness right which is always a little bit of the fear making bland levels is is not great so you pair these two rules together you've got a basic flow every level unlocks a new ability and then we can use that ability to drive a theme throughout the level and once we know our unique ability the level designer can sort of go hog wild we can start to think about how this mechanic will work with combat narrative and exploration if it's a really great mechanic it should be able to talk to all three of the most important elements of the game uh personal favorite of mine is the hook shot right everyone loves the hook shot you can use it to navigate you can use it to fight you can grab rupees with it

you can solve puzzles with it the hook shot literally talks to everything in the game that is the most important element and that's why it is so meaningful to the player and so if paced correctly and the items are meaningful then players will actually get excited and anticipate the next big unlock so here is the ability that's utilized in the stonemason level it's called the shock arrow and shock arrows are super basic shock arrows are magic arrows that atreus can fire at red crystals and they go boom that's pretty much it but it's actually awesome because it's simple design allows for a lot of versatility if it's too complex a level mechanic then we're really going to struggle to create a lot of variety or we're going to struggle to have scenarios where the player might be under duress and actually be able to use the mechanic so its simplicity is actually terrific so of course before it looks like this in the game we do a really basic prototype to make sure it's actually fun and that it's going to deliver on this potential versatility and variety

and here is the prototype [Music] so [Music] [Music] so this level prototype was actually

created by john marcelo who's one of the senior designers at santa monica studio we started this project so long ago he actually used the touchpad as the prototype and everyone thought it generally had potential so from there it went through some additional iterations to find out what the best controls and rules would be we have a whole systems design department that are really masters of this domain and then as level designers we try to use those mechanics but eventually it would it would sort of determine that it would be even cooler if atreus could help you out right we might get back a little bit more combat exploration and narrative maybe we can actually get father-son connection out of this mechanic as well so it was added to a tracer's bow basically you press square and a trace fires the arrow for you um it's pretty simple but as i mentioned our desire is to create father-son connection and also give the level designers a lot of versatility in scenario design as you can see here this mechanic is awesome because it can be used on tons of different stuff and the red material which does actually have some narrative in the game it's kind of the the roots

of the adrassal tree so between visual development and the level mechanic team and between the level designers and the environment artists we're able to create tons of versatility as to how this red sap or this red material can be placed around the level spot on because that's the thing that's going to allow us to create an established theme throughout the level in addition it was thought that we had a pretty good mechanic but that we could get a bit of additional play out of it once again to push variety so there was the decision made to add a throwable element which is awesome now we can have static scenarios and we can have scenarios that allow a bit more player creativity and finally once we're really happy with it late in development we polish it so that it can accentuate its role and be a very prominent uh theme throughout the level you can see here that it has an inner glow so that it pops just a little bit more tiny bit arcady and you can also see that as you pass the camera around this object it has a little bit of sheen on it so that it's likely to just

you know catch your eye as you move the camera so let's take a look at one of the scenarios in the level and how it works with the core pillars once again try to think of this in terms of combat narrative and exploration i'll start with narrative here uh this sort of concept of a puzzle is great for slowing down the player and just having narrative moments in general in fact maybe after a little while the ai partner can even give you a hint this scenario is also terrific because it's been fabulously integrated by the environment art team it's actually the ring finger of the giant so it foreshadows the narrative that you're going to see further on and you may not know this but all the runes on the ring were actually translated by someone so they all actually have real meaning if you go back and translate them if you're really into the narrative of the game so in terms of exploration well you can see here he's blowing up an additional secret and that may not be exploration per se right it's not a super explorable space you didn't find a

hidden dungeon or anything like that but really it's kind of more of a gimme it's a tutorial for exploration that's teaching you keep an eye out for future scenarios like this and keep keep your brain checked for shock crystals because shock crystals can equal secrets right and so this is a little bit of a gimme but it does sort of train you on exploration and then finally for combat well the shock arrows are really great for combat in general that was already thought of because atrace can actually use them in combat scenarios give you an advantage they have a whole skill tree this is where i love this scenario because if you actually fire a shock arrow in combat at the ring you can get an aoe and you can actually blast the ai so everything starts to talk to each other and you can even sort of experiment with it while under duress that's part of the advantage of it being so simple now you may not remember these scenarios actually showed you them at the top of the presentation but a lot of the scenarios i showed you actually had shock crystals in the background let's take a look you'll see that this

is the first one i showed you where it's just in the background maybe it hints to you that you can get a bit of damage if you're experimental you can see that it can be used for throwable puzzles in the top right uh down below it's actually used for a shock crystal chandelier section and the thing that's sort of nice about the shock crystals is even though they are kind of big and glowy we're able to get them into a lot of the environments so they can even be in the background of cinematics without being like too offensive or anything like that let's take a look at it from a top-down perspective once again you'll see that the shock arrows are really nicely distributed throughout the level and i love that because that is the thing that is making it a theme some players even called it the shock arrow level when they would come out of play test which if you're a level designer is the real compliment right when they ignore everything else and just talk about the mechanics and it was also great from a production perspective and a code perspective because as i mentioned at the top of the presentation we can't code every feature ever we're

in a very fortunate situation to have so much support from sony but even still we have limitations and we don't want to code everything ever so using the shock arrow is still a very efficient use of the mechanic as well so you can probably tell from my pride and joy with all these scenarios that i think the level designer kai absolutely crushed it i think this is one of the best themes throughout the game this is what i love about level design and he really nailed the flow level unlocks a key item and then the level uses that item to create a strong theme throughout the level but there is an additional detail to this as i alluded to every level unlocks a key item right and that starts to touch on how we think about more of the level to level experience and what the overarching experience is so with that in mind uh the next rule is all about creating a format what is a format some people talk about format maybe like structure or something like that i like to define it as the intuitive rules by which levels flow into one

another so if the pieces are lined up correctly you can start to create some psychology and a mental layer and players can start to identify with how they'll engage in sessions and how they'll play levels in god of war there's actually like a lot of different types of content there's critical path levels there's exploration levels even little puzzles that are optional there's actually entire areas you can discover on your own so it's really important that we start to build some expectations in the player's head if you enter a story mission in a game how do you know intuitively that you're going to maybe start like 60 minutes worth of content and start to get into it there's some psychology and consistency within the game to start establishing that rhythm in your head and if you go down a side path and you think to yourself oh awesome here i go down this little side path i know the main path's over there well that means it was a correctly signaled b path that means it was correctly set up through the level design to intuitively let you know that you're going down the side path not the main path

regardless in god of war we are often described as maybe having a bit of a metroidvania element or something like that and we often hear from players that they know when they can continue the story and when they can go exploring which is great that's exactly what i'm looking for so our next rule works with all the previous rules before it to try and create those expectations and deliver on those results for the player it's really simple it's just about giving the player a clear exploration break as i mentioned before all levels they give you a key item right and our exploration break is the opportunity for you to experiment with that it's the thing that lets you know that it's time to go and use it in a more playful or freeform way so i'll go into a step deeper on how that flow achieves basically the metroidvania element so in the previous level as i mentioned the theme is the shock arrow and we try to deliver on that all throughout the level but what you may not have noticed is that the shock arrow

actually ceases around the three-quarter point in the level on the way back out through the level there's no more shock arrow scenario so what's the deal did we like run out of money or run out of ideas something like that no this is actually where the boss battle takes place in the level it's what you might describe as the key turning point so going back to our triangle the first three quarters of the level delivers on the theme and then we hit a key turning point now it doesn't have to be a boss battle it can be anything you want it can be a key story moment it can be a major chest or some kind of a choir it can even be a revelation for the character but what matters is the final quarter of the level is dedicated to teaching the new item or teaching the new ability if done correctly it's an embedded tutorial of sorts it's it's sort of the type of thing where learning is fun right it's a hard thing to accomplish but if you do it then the players sort of fooled into the fact that they're doing a tutorial and then to wrap it up our last rule finishes with an exploration break so

going back to our top down map the first three quarters of the level makes up the shark arrow distribution and then our boss battle here creates the key turning point and then we use the last 25 percent of the level to reward the new item which in this case is a magic chisel that he can use to unlock different doors around the game there's three scenarios so you confidently learn you know three is always a great design number and then finally we wrap up with an exploration break so in summary we have everything we need now we've created a strong theme and we've given you an exciting item we've taught you how to use it and now we capitulate with an exploration break what is the net result here why is this even important well it creates a very natural motivator to explore you are excited to go exploring because you got a new toy and you only got to use it three times so you might want to keep using it right it's brand new and you're motivated to explore because you might have actually seen areas in the game that

that use this ability that's great level design if we can plant it in your head as you go and finally you're given a very clearly signal break you don't have to worry you know that this is a good time to explore you know that this is a good time to go off the path and you know this is a good time to confidently explore an experiment to put it simply it actually takes a lot of mental load to plan a path around an exploration space to navigate by pois to look for secrets to find things and i want you to use your entire mental energy on that i don't want you to be wondering if you know how to use an ability or if you know if it's the right time to be exploring so by threading you in the back part of the level through the tutorial experience we can make sure that when you go exploring you have everything you need to go to the hub now here's how we achieve a format you stack a few of these triangles back to back and you have a consistent format that can be used to inspire and motivate from a level to level perspective our first level starts we teach a theme

throughout the level we hit a key turning point we reward a new item we give you a clear break to explore that item is then reutilized through the next level so we can get a lot of value out of it we keep pushing the theme throughout the level boom key turning point again just as you're getting fatigued with that item we try to give you a new item every 90 to 120 minutes and so forth and so forth and so forth and if done correctly players will start to learn this flow in the back of their head if there's ever a pacing dip or they feel like maybe they're tired of something they will be excited and expired inspired about the next big item or the next big unlock on the next big ability the promise of new and cool items also comes with the promise of varied themes and varied scenarios because we've shown you that these new items and abilities give you lots of different game play in the different levels the flow is motivating and most importantly we can actually use that motivation to prioritize exploration here's a quick example

i want you to watch what the player does here as he boats around your magic led him to new forms of experimentation for them new levels of depravity look where we are we're back okay so in this example the player is exploring the hub they've been correctly taught the shark arrow mechanic and thanks to the design work done by kaizen they've also been told that shock arrows mean interesting themes and that there's a lot of different variety and a lot of different gameplay right so we've made a convincing promise to the player so watch it one more time and i want you to watch just what the camera behavior does the taste of vanilla magic led him to new forms of experimentation for them new levels of depravity look where we are we're back boom and there it is he saw a shot crystal right he has been taught correctly he has been promised interesting gameplay and because he is returning to the hub he is thinking oh i feel like doing one of those i know how those work i'm in the mood for one of those or he

can just explore it on his own that is the benefit the result is that we do have a compass system and we do have a map right but our hope is that players will be self-motivated and that self-discovery will drive their exploration instead it's good for players to feel motivated via ui or completion percentages these are very valid design techniques and tools but it's also good if players are self-motivated because they're actually seeking out interesting content if this player likes shock crystal scenarios then he can go and find more of them on his own players are trained that new abilities will be unlocked in the levels and that in turn interesting scenarios will be delivered so the promise becomes more than just completion percentages the promise becomes interesting scenarios and that is pretty much our games format you play the level you unlock a new item you played a variety of scenarios when you return back to the hub you've been taught how to use it you've been made the convincing promise of interesting gameplay

you can seek out more of those on your own if you like those types of scenarios which most players did especially in terms of the shock arrows and then when you're ready you can start returning back to the next level so that is why we give players such clear exploration breaks and that's why we set up so many expectations leading up to those exploration breaks and now that we have a good what you might call level to level flow or level to level philosophy our last rule details the final tool we need to sort of tie it all together it's about creating an overarching layout that can actually emphasize that psychology difference between a hub and an open world could maybe be a whole like gdc presentation of its own right there's a lot of different uh things to dive into there but for today what i want to talk about is how a hub through its very physical design mirrors the level to level flow that i've shown you earlier it presents it as a playable layout is the hope and the hub is our way of creating

information in your head as to where there's a playground for experimentation and exploration versus where the critical path will take over and continue the story so with that over to rule number six hubs are not open world let's start with a quick definition of what a hub actually is then a hub is a centralized location from which spokes emit and so while an open world may offer a sprawling simulation or something like that a hub is actually a very specific layout and one that proved very effective for us here's a quick image of a hub it's a pretty basic one and using this and the definition here you can see that the yellow center acts as a central location the arrows coming out represent the uh represent the spokes and the blue circles represent the destinations or the endpoints right so a lot of people describe ahab as

a wagon wheel that's a pretty popular comparison and using our definitions we can start to run that through quick sanity check central core spokes and endpoints or in level design terms you could maybe recontextualize these you might call them a centralized site or pathways and maybe the endpoint destinations or levels or dungeons or something like that here's a popular example you're probably aware of shadow the colossus one of the greatest games of all time the player always returns back to the colossus temple at the center of the level then they start to go exploring and they find more destinations on their own and they're always reverted back to the central location right in popular culture disneyland is is probably the most well-known example it has the mickey mouse statue in the middle you take pathways out you find the different lands as they are called it's a very effective and fairly traditional level design technique right and one for us that i think was the perfect canvas for our

level to level flow so let's take a look of it in a quick example using the stern mason level as you can see here the temple in the center represents the centralized core coming off this is pathways these represent the directional spokes to which the player can explore and go around and finally our levels and our dungeons they sort of represent the destinations or the endpoint of the hubspot diagram so now we can test it against our hub diagram you can see that's actually pretty familiar not just because i match the colors and remember before our level to level flow you know establish a theme hit a key turning point earn a new ability or item uh get a clear exploration break continue continue continue let's run this against the stonemason level in the previous level the player goes up to the mountains and they use the previous levels mechanic which in this case let's just call it orange to avoid spoilers

and they start to use this it also creates a theme throughout the level they hit a capitulation point and they're rewarded with the shock arrow at the end of this level the player can now make their way back to the hub having confidently been taught how to use the shocker they can now choose to explore with it if they want and then when they're ready they can explore back for a quick narrative beat there's a sort of mini mission that takes place here at mini level and when they're ready to go to the main critical path level they head back to the stone mason level we drive that theme all the way through the level create a lot of variety a lot more pacing increase the complexity a little bit of the shock arrow scenarios boom just as you're getting fatigued key turning point new ability or item teach you three scenarios and then you're back to the hub and as we strip all of this away it becomes apparent that this layout is very similar to the big wagon wheel overall i believe the lake of nine was great at delivering the goals of a hub and it's this hub design that in turn is really successful at achieving the sort of

metroidvania element that people often enjoy in this game so there's your hub and with that we're back to our rule slide i'll add it to the annex let's go through all of these and i'll quickly recap it's also a good time to mention that these are actually sometimes really good design priorities as you step through a really big project or a lot of work you can also start to think of these as maybe the order of operations that you might want to take experiences on in a game up front is just about how we start to think together and how we work together to start creating some focus as a you know design group whether that's technically designers or just people who we work with rule number two represents our desire to represent those core pillars as metrics how we're going to construct effectively and consistently amongst one another rules three and four it's all about the backbone of creativity and the backbone of variety and pacing rule five ensures that we have clear exploration breaks and and that levels flow

clearly from one another and finally our newest rule number six it's sort of an overarching wrapper or an overarching layout for the whole experience and with that we have a game but since it's gdc and since we're here to learn about the tricky nature of development i'll now step back through all of these and show you where they all broke and not just because there was bad design or not just because something was wrong sometimes it's also an opportunity sometimes maybe a problem just didn't work out the way we expected or sometimes it's just common sense right so here's rule number one what you might have noticed is that this game has a lot of puzzles and puzzles are not represented anywhere in the core pillars of the game so what's the deal are puzzles are called pillar or not right and this is a question that took us about four and a half years to work out so even though the puzzles take a lot of work and even though they do take a lot of play testing they're a great addition to the game because they let us tap into the three

pillars of the game in really great ways i like to look at the puzzles in terms of sort of uh emphasizes or subcategories of combat narrative and exploration as i mentioned earlier puzzles are great for just slowing down the action in general so we can get a lot of narrative between the characters there's a lot more father-son teamwork in a puzzle so that can be a good way to emphasize that pillar in terms of exploration puzzles often make us rethink the space so they keep us in the space a little bit longer at santa monica studios we truly do have some of the best environment artists in the world so we're always looking for ways to get the player to soak in the space just a little bit more and try to appreciate the spaces not blow through them too quickly and finally for combat the puzzles actually teach you to learn i'll show you one more time this scenario this one is early in the game and it's actually tuned a little bit difficult why because we would rather that you fail on the scenario a couple of times and learn how to throw the axe more effectively so that when you step into the more complex scenarios in the game you have trained yourself how to do

something that doesn't really exist in any other game throwing an axe and recalling it is fairly abstract it's something that makes this game unique and so by tuning this puzzle just a bit difficult we can be guaranteed that sort of the types of players who will engage with stretch content or more complex content are also the types of players who might train and master more complex mechanics so in short puzzles a big part of the game but they're not a core pillar number two we are a metrics-based game so the norse landscape itself is really organic and really mysterious and that was one thing that was very obvious to us from day one but metrics are actually really rigid and they're deliberately so so how do you kind of tie these things together there's a natural conflict that emerges right so here's a quick example of where it broke i've shown you my favorite example which is the three meter boost and on the right hand side you can see that there's a lot of debris or shrub so in the test bed it looks great you can see that it's a very clear perpendicular object

it's kind of turreted in this example so we can accentuate the nature of it but by the time we put debris over it it sort of loses its ability to be an architectural piece what now what are we going to do get mad at each other blame each other scream at each other pull go into each other's files pull out shrubs no what we actually did is come up with a style guide this indicates where shrubs and debris should actually be placed and where design metrics need to be kept important to keep things clear fortunately we have an environment team who is extraordinarily talented and very passionate about the game and you might think that pitching to a team hey we're going to talk about rules for shrub placement or where shrubs can't go might be the most boring conversation ever but actually everyone really rallied together to talk about how we could create a style guide for shrubs and the net result is that shrubs and debris can actually be used not only um to uh when they're removed they not only make

spaces very clear but if you put them in certain places they can actually act as a deterrent as well so by creating these two uh style guide rules we could actually uh basically create uh organic placement where we didn't want you to go and architectural placement where we wanted to emphasize you going so there's a lot of uh positive and negative visual expectations that you can actually create also uh what about rules three and four variety all levels have a theme right uh not in the back 25 of this game i'm not going to spoil anything for you but the reason is twofold like what's the deal did you run out of money again did you run out of ideas was like four years too long to make a game do you not want to go to five or six no we don't have an unlimited budget on features and we do try to use them as effectively as possible right and when we started to paper plan the game we did realize that we were going to run out of mechanics and that we didn't have an unlimited budget and that we didn't want to spend forever you know just prototyping and whatever so the back part of the game are really

more about mastery than about newness keep in mind all of the level theming that i mentioned earlier it's not specifically about creating new items all the time it's about creating variety and there is more ways to create variety than just adding more mechanics to the game so here's a quick example the temple flip level towards the end of the game is often oop sorry let me get that up for you oh no well the temple flip level of the game is actually often described as final exam and what that means is that it uses all the previous level mechanics of the game together and so um let me get this back up and running i think we've crashed oh there we go okay so in this example it's the only time in the game where crusher trap and shock arrow are

used together the reason for this is that the crusher trap is a one-hit ko and so when we combine these two things together there is a different emotion and more variety established through the combination of those two elements so the deeper the player gets into the game the more they know about the game and the more you can promote challenge uh strategy and meta gaming through the existing mechanics and the net result is still interesting gameplay right it's still variety finally i'll keep this one really quick once we had good level to level flow players were still not really understanding or certain players were still not really understanding where they could and couldn't explore and we believed pretty strongly from a level design perspective that the hub was the right way to go that we'd done all the right work and that we'd created a good overarching format but some players just really needed to be hit over the head that they could explore they needed that final confirmation so to solve this we collaborated with the writers so that whenever the player re-enters the hub they're given an additional line of dialogue from kratos and atreus indicating that

it might be a good time to explore you can actually see here that whenever they step through these two doors they'll get a little line of dialogue and they'll say something like hey maybe we should like go exploring right now what do you think dad but the thing is we had to write them so many times so that it was never mandating the player to do so and so with some of these things it really does come down to play testing and trying a variety of different lines and trying a different group of reads finally hubs are not open worlds well one interesting conflict here is whether we needed to align too much to the purity of a wheel spoke format let's take a look at it one more time you can see here that the hub spoke is a literal circle right which is great on paper it gives us a very clear understanding of how it's meant to work it's a very clear design trope it's very clear on what we're trying to deliver but as you can see the pure nature of a circle doesn't really give the environment team much wiggle room to deliver on the fantasy of a fabulous norse lush

landscape right so what we have to consider is can we deliver on a hub if the elements are made a bit more organic this is what it would look like if it was a pure circle and this is kind of what it ended up like so you have to start wondering once we've got this uh structural center and we have these pathways which are retained very clearly how else can we accentuate the hub-like nature while also delivering on the organics and the answer was that all around the lake of nine there's these additional towers and even though they may not um necessarily create a pure circle per se in terms of a barrier they do help to create an additional anchor that helps us emphasize the hub so even though the level itself became more organic there's still enough hub-like elements that we can retain the core design intent while also supporting the needs of the environment art team so i mentioned at the top of the presentation that this project actually did have a lot of risks right and even though

from a technical standpoint areas like the lake of nine which was created and led by louis sanchez and john palamarchuk they worked on it for a long time and it was a huge technical task to get it up and running but the nice thing about some of these design rules is that they're pretty easy for us to understand and get excited about they're mostly what i would consider to be design classics they're not that fancy you can see how having a unique item and a lot of variety in each levels is going to drive themes and make things fun right you can see how having a hub will be a good overarching wrapper to a game into an exploration experience and that's why sometimes going with a design classic is really great amongst all the technical challenges or additional creative challenges that we're trying to solve together a design classic can sort of let you predict head a little bit you you're confident that it's going to come together and you can focus a little bit more on the day of the day challenges so if i can leave you with one kind of wrap-up thought it's this i love a design classic they let you create foundation

they're awesome they give you structure they give you canvas all the building blocks for a game but they are pretty much just that from there it's really over to the team and over to creativity and over to variety you do need a strong foundation and you do need a strong design canvas but a canvas is not inherently interesting on its own so i'll leave you with one final rule because the thing that elevates a design canvas into an actual experience is a lot of creators coming together to add texture thank you i think we have a couple of quick minutes and i will mention at this point um we are hiring and we're trying to make a really big game again in some form or another we're always excited about new people joining the team and they're not all from huge aaa backgrounds a lot of people come from different backgrounds yes uh hi so

one comment one question i liked how you kept coming back to the six rules card that was inherently your hub in this presentation thank you and then the second uh the question is and you kind of spoke about this at the end but there was a very clear format for introducing new items new abilities um and then carrying them forward but could you speak a little bit about how you like brought items like legacy items essentially that you already taught earlier in the game and brought them back later in the game type thing uh yes wherever possible uh we try to make sure that the level has an overarching theme but it should never come at the cost of additional variety so mixing and matching previous levels mechanics as long as they're taught correctly and as long as we have confidence that the player knows how to use them again you can create a lot of variety by mixing and matching those correctly right so for example atreus and his rules are taught very early in the game and those are leveraged all the way through the course of the game with additional mechanics okay cool thank you yeah

oh let's go with the left side maybe okay um so i was wondering actually when you mentioned that you used metrics as a role for the level design did you also support it with analytics or some sort of thing like that or was it more like general metrical guidelines really for level design yeah we use a few maya tools for example for the slopes to detect whether something is actually to metric or not for the most part it is down to the taste of the designer and the environment artist to stick to the rules um if the game comes up with bugs you'll know why because it probably didn't hit the metrics and the analytics are mostly used for player feedback and for combat tuning testing economy and sort of more broader reaching things that are harder for us to test with our our hands gotcha thanks yeah hi thanks for the talk um i'm sorry if i spoil this for someone uh you talk about the central hub at a at a horizontal level but one of

the particularities of that central habitat is that it's also vertical it has a lot of verticality and i wonder if you could elaborate on what went into designing and designing that sort of like water template theme uh yes very early on part of the fantasy of the lake of nine was that it would be a double stacked hub and that was a very early decision because as you're alluding to it's a huge amount of design work to plan for that and to account for that so i wouldn't necessarily recommend retrofitting it at the last second because we didn't and it was thought about for a very long time there were many experiments and prototypes in terms of the content there's an overarching rule that it should be fun at level one and fun at level two but for different reasons so at level one it's more about the questing experience and uh reminding you how to fight teaching you the ropes of exploration in the game and at level two as i mentioned it's more about mastery and it's some of the more difficult puzzles and difficult scenarios in the

game since they're optional that's great for us because a lot of the designers actually love building those more complex scenarios so it's a perfect opportunity to put complexity with optional uh drive matched together thank you yeah yes so you mentioned that you introduce a new mechanic or ability about 90 minutes or two hours something like that i was just wondering how do you make it so a player doesn't get bored of it because a lot of times i've seen many games that you get a new ability and players just like that half an hour and they're all okay what's next right uh i think that's a great takeaway the goal should not be to come up with more mechanics if you run into that problem the goal should be to evaluate whether you've created enough interesting scenarios so as i showed you earlier even just inside the pillar of combat there's a lot of different versatility you can create inside that if you're willing to add a timer to something or a death to something

you can take a look at that mechanic and start to think what vectors have we not utilized this mechanic for already and if players are saying they're bored it might be the mechanic but it might also be that the scenarios aren't pushing the player's brain in enough different directions right okay thank you yeah hi thank you for the talk one thing that was quite amazing in uh god of war with the fact that um with a collectible placement when i was uh looking for them i couldn't find any and when i stopped looking for them i usually ended up having a hundred percent competition of levels and it felt like you had like a really keen understanding of the player psychology what they were going to look at and could you elaborate on the processes that come with that when did you i did the collectibles were you looking at play tests and things like that um any collectibles in particular ravens mostly which ones ravens oh rare runes um okay i would say put simply

for some of the more bespoke collectibles um the game rewards players who explore by beating the curve right like the game is not so huge it looks bigger than it is if you actually look at the geo so by circling around the space a lot you may feel like you're discovering it on your own but more likely scenario is that you've just gone past that area a lot of times or that you stumbled across it a little bit so for example the language discs um most players feel like they discover them on their own and players who go exploring will discover them but there's an additional set in the critical path levels for players who didn't go exploring and both groups of players will still stumble across those advanced collectibles together for the runes it's a little bit more complicated but i hope i've given you enough to go on okay thanks uh yeah i think one more from each side yeah in the level the design process i know it's really important especially in a game like this you have a heavy combat

side but you also have to really balance it out with puzzles um it puzzles with the characters at what point is it you really went combat first really heavy and then you said well let's think about the puzzles or did you immediately say we have to think about both evenly and what was that process like for the team uh great question one of the um solutions to this in the game was the triple chests as they called or the non-uh chess they are a terrific addition to the game because they don't impact the layouts or the environment art the way like a full room scenario would and they let us look back at things that were maybe previously combat spaces that might not have as much adventuring or exploration in there as we'd like and they were a particularly good way to sort of uh bring the balance together in areas that were sort of maybe mismatched hi so i was curious given the way that hubs work and how shared the mechanics were across many of the levels how difficult did that make pivoting in

the design and direction for levels like were there any special challenges with that yes and i would say that santa monica studios is one studio where we value the environment art very highly and the workflow environment artists very highly so that decision to make a hub was extraordinarily early in the project there were other different models that we looked at and other different ideas but once we committed to that hub design there was sort of no going back we we had to just really nail it and all the way in the last six months of the project it was nerve-racking but as i mentioned luis sanchez john palomar chuck and florence strauss they really pulled through on it and i really respect how much everyone just kind of stuck to their guns and kept going because it was very integral to the game by that point yeah okay last one yeah hi rob uh thanks for the talk i was wondering if you have some guidelines in order to design side missions or optional areas uh thinking about uh what you say

that at the end of every critical pot level you have to get a new ability so how you could design side missions making them like interesting and satisfactory to the player at the end i'll speak on behalf of our exploration lead a little bit here and i hope i you know express his philosophies correctly i he has often mentioned to me that he believes once there was a strong narrative thread through the side missions that it really uh created a lot more drive for players because they actually liked criticism and atreus as a partnership together and when they lacked narrative it was problematic so um the additional narrative through line of those side missions is critical and also the reward tuning on them if you have a bad reward at the end of those uh if players are giving you a one through five if they don't like the reward it doesn't matter what happened they'll just give you a one or something like that if they didn't like the reward so you got to really get the rewards correct and you really have to have

it can't just live on gameplay there also has to be like a strong narrative through line as well okay thank you and happy gdc