Using Level Design Tools Expressively

[Music] so first I just want to throw up the obligatory uh resume slide um just so you know where I'm coming from and what I'm talking about uh my career has largely been working on sort of narrative firstperson games in which I've been a level designer for about 10 years and that's mostly the sort of stuff that I was going to be focusing on um I'm currently working on something that's not that at all and I'm not really going to be talking about that very much at all so first I want to talk about like what do I mean by expressive and I I think there's a couple there's like two components that I wanted to talk about um one is expressing something about the world or characters and it's just the ways that you can use like really simple level design tools to say something essentially to act in the world on behalf of the characters that you are portraying through your um scripting and then the other is sort of creating opportunities for player expression which I just want to look at a couple examples of ways that um you can use again your very a very simple tool set to create opportunities where the player can say something about

themselves in the world and um the sort of player they want to be and I'm going to be looking at this through the frame of um specifically scripting um one thing just a warning it occurred to me while I was sitting up here that I'm going to be referring to the script which is like the written document that defines what happens in the world and the dialogue and whatnot and um scripting and uh which is the actual logic that is driving the game um so let me apologize in advance for that CU I realize it might be confusing um I'm also really mostly going to be looking at really simple tools like delays and triggers and counters that sort of thing like the really basic building blocks of uh scripting uh level so I also just wanted to talk a little bit about um the level design job U because the stuff that I'm looking at really pertains to one particular type of level design uh as Joel indicated earlier level design can mean a lot of different things and my job as a level designer now is very very different so this is really um looking at the job of the level designer on narrative authored for person type games uh which is

admittedly a very thin slice of what level design can be um so in looking at what that job is I was thinking about what I looked for when I was hiring people uh when I was working at a rational and there are really two main qualities that I was looking for one was the ability to flawlessly execute required content and that what that means is basically you're given a script by you know creative Direction and it's your job to just make that happen in the world in a way that just feels great from the first time through it and um also that you can build in a way that is really um functional and um uh robust and not you know terrible and won't fall apart the moment somebody sort of misbehaves in a way and then the other is uh the ability to sort of effectively fill in the gaps in that script um with your own Creative Solutions that are sort of on tone and on theme with what's going on around it and really the Flawless execution part is the part that I think is kind of most important um for a level designer at least in my own experience maybe 95 or more perc of my time was spent really just implementing

stuff um as written and just sort of making things work the remaining 5% is sort of the really creative like I'm inventing the scene and it's going to be awesome and I'm a great writer and so on and so forth um but flawless execution super important because it's mostly what you're doing so where I want to start is just looking at like a first pth sort of the graybox script in a way and I want to look at like essentially like a really really simple kind of sequence which is you're given um you're given a script and in it it's got just a moment and a thing is said or something occurs like the player enters this room and then this vo line plays uh a typical sort of first pass at something like this I just um just sort of showed a version of it this is all done in unreal 4 because that's what I'm working on right now uh it's basically the players touch a trigger I check that it's player play a sound it's really simple it gets a point across but there's not a lot of art there um so I want to look at just a moment from infinite hold on oh all right there it

goes uh in which this was basically the script the player sees this uh body and then they say something this supposed to be audio from this H well that's a bummer all right uh so basically he uh walked up to the body looked for a moment and said [ __ ] um so that that was the script um it's like a really really simple moment you know uh Booker Lighthouse sees body says [ __ ] uh so essentially that was like you know the thing you just looked at trigger is hit thing occurs um but there's something else that's going on in there and that's the delay which I think is sort of one of the fundamental like little building blocks of building uh interesting sort of uh scripts and the delay I depict here is like a02 second delay which is actually for like narrative stuff um kind of a really good place to start like it's really small

but it's a way to sort of approximate that moment when somebody is like parsing or um you know a character is like uh taking a moment to gain understanding because brains don't tend to work as fast as you know the tick rate of your game as you're playing it uh this is a really powerful tool that is kind of divisive uh in my experience Tech hates them um delays add a lot of noise to systems um in that you know when it's time to debug a delay can create all sorts of weird problems because this stuff that's supposed to be executing in this really precise order that the programmers can anticipate now has a designer kind of screwing things up and arbitrarily you know just adding problems you can create race conditions they become really hard to debug conversely narrative is going to want you to always use delays because essentially you're trying generally to depict like sort of human interactions um within essentially like a machine of just things that click on and off and using little moments and pauses is sort of the tool that the level designer has where they can essentially act in the world you know where you can insert a pause which is you know a huge part of of acting is just like the moments when

you don't say something or editing as well you know it's the the moments when things um are not occurring and that's what the delay is really good at doing so they can do all sorts of different things you know they can depict uh sort of a pause uh between thoughts or a moment to gain understanding uh they can also be used to sort of set up a joke or uh you know be the moment before a jump scare to build tension oops and I want to use an example of that which actually I think no audio here is okay this is from gone home oh and then the delay went off at that moment the thing I like about that like I think that's a really Artful use of a very very simple tool which is the tool is basically a timer goes off uh when the player reads the note and then that timer is tuned to be a point that nobody is reasonably going to be able to read that whole note and then it sort of

forces that note down um so the player can no longer read it and then after that the player can no longer pick it up I really like that moment because I think it's like it's a really Artful use of a very very simple tool and it also is just an interesting moment because it's one of the only moments I could think of in gone home uh and actually really anywhere like this is not a common thing to do where there's a really clear tension established between what the character in the world wants and what the player wants to do and they actually fight with each other and the the character you're inhabiting sort of asserts themselves so it's a cool moment and I think like that's that's a great example of a good way to use this sort of tool another tool I wanted to talk about briefly is the line of sight trigger which I view is sort of one of the most vital tools for doing sort of firstperson narrative uh storytelling it's basically just a trigger that fires when the player has line of sight to something and the functionality for this sort of thing is pretty simple I'm just going to outline it if you don't have this into your engine and you're making like a first- person game put in a request with tech to make sure that you get this thing because it is super useful and well it's a very powerful tool so you're looking for a two features for it uh one is the uh active

area like the screen percent so basically you've got this big screen and you want to make sure that you know the player has the thing that you want to know they're looking at in the center of the screen or maybe you want to make sure it's at the periphery uh depending on what sort of event you're going to fire uh excuse me you've got a trigger distance which you want to make sure the trigger just doesn't uh work over infinite distances because you know you're setting up something you want the player to respond to or acknowledge but if they see it through like a weird sort of you know Gap in the geometry or something from a great distance away you don't want to need to sort of account for that and you don't want to need to build extra logic to kind of turn it on and off uh you need the sort of the on begin overlap like line of sight is gained on end overlap it ends uh the ability to toggle it and then for bonus points you'd actually probably want to see if you could get built in like a time delay within it so that it will fire an output when you say like X number of seconds have passed so you know that the player has been continuously looking at something for uh some amount of time and

again I'm going to look at another example for this uh and actually with no audio you're not going to be able to hear really what happens oh is there oh sorry sorry whoops all right oh uh oh I think I just broke it man I'm not good at computers I guess all right let me see if I can oh man all right well anyway there we go the seed of the Prophet huh [Music]

yeah so very much like the prior example the script for that was very simple the player sees this sign and then they say something about it the thing with that sign is positionally it's like over the player's head so use a line of sight trigger there to determine that they are now looking up and actually reading the thing um so then I can fire something appropriately off that um there's also another thing going on in here which is uh hesis and I'm going to talk through what this is uh because it looks like a mess right now um but basically hysteresis is like the dictionary definition is up there um the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes and the effect causing it really what this means is you just trigger events on thresholds as opposed to just sort of a binary onoff switch so the script to um basically use a line of sight trigger um in a way that exhibits hysteresis is right here you've got on look I'm uh setting uh B is looking a Boolean to True waiting for a delay checking if that Boolean is still true then this is just a gate that will only

ever fire once and in this example just cuz it's an example I set up it's just printing a string um but the important thing here is the untouch like the line of sight lost event which you then set this booly into fault so what occurs there is um is as the uh delay winds down um if the player has looked away it won't fire as true and the reason this sort of thing is important especially with line of sight triggers is players are super erratic they're like swinging their crosshairs all around they may not actually be looking at a thing um they could just be like swinging their Crosshair around to shoot some fool uh so you want to just make sure that there's uh like they have lingered on something for a moment another way to uh to use hysteresis is actually in physical triggers um this is just a a sleep location from the current game I'm working on the way you do this is actually use two triggers for events one uh a small trigger you use for on touch and then a larger trigger used for on untouch and um there's a couple benefits to this both Technical and sort of um like more

softer experiential uh the the kind of softer experiential benefit is um you know the in a level the player moving through they're basically like just operating on and off switches um on a bunch of logic and when you sort of on off something on a single switch it could feel very uh binary because it is um and it can have sort of dithering problems where if somebody's going back and forth over a switch it can become really obvious that oh this light is somehow tied to where I'm standing on the floor and that's really weird um so it's it's just like sort of a good General way to sort of make something turn off at one point and um on at one point and off at another in a way that doesn't feel super mechanical um but it's also really good just in terms of uh like a best practice technically um because a lot of times you might be doing something with a trigger that takes longer than a single frame or a tick to uh execute so an example might be say you are you've got an AI encounter and you want to spawn a bunch of AIS in it the first thing you might is just wrap the whole thing in a

big trigger and um on approach you spawn all the AIS like on touch and on untouch you unspa them the issues from that can come about because spawning an AI typically takes longer than it takes to just uh ZIP back and forth over a trigger then you can find yourself in a situation where basically youve untouched the trigger while the AIS are still spawning maybe that untouch is doing something like deactivating the logic that controls the AI so now they're spawning but there's nothing to control them maybe at that point you find yourself with a bunch of Rogue AIS with like nothing managing them and maybe at that point you find yourself in a situation where QA figures out a method whereby they can do that with every trigger in the game and maybe at that point you cancel your vacation plans to uh rewrite all the triggers so you don't want to do that you just build your triggers in this way you're saving yourself a lot of grief so hysteresis I think is a good um it's a good overall tool in that it allows you to do things like wait for a moment uh confirm engagement

let the player think uh let the character think and also avoid sort of mechanical issues like dithering and and really obvious mechanical um uh bugs and low Repro bugs that are hard to track down I want to look at another example which is where you start to sort of build these things together this is the uh honor store from the beginning of BioShock Infinite and uh this is again just using some very simple tools but it's stying to build an actual interactive sequence in which the player can express something about themselves whoops sore but a bit weak in the key in the scroll cloudless skies warm temperatures and light variable winds throughout the afternoon in short a beautiful day for the festivities Colombia and now back to the music here come [Music]

so what I like about that moment is really it's it's very early on in the game it's before all the sort of core verbs have opened up the player doesn't have a gun yet they're sort of in the um the walk around and experience the world it's like the introduction but there's not a lot of sort of interactive options um but what it creates is a an opportunity for the player to interact with something in the world and do something that in a non-consequential way allows them to express something about themselves and you know what the sort of player they are and what they want to be like and this is all optional too there's no reason you need to go in there but if you do you can decide like am I a crook or you know am I an honest person and it's really simple like it's just it's a fun thing to do that lets people just sort of you know touch and interact with the world a little bit and uh the construction of this is actually very simple um it's basically there's a look trigger inside the door on approach which um causes the animation of the existing customer to play where he flips the coin in and there's also just a touch trigger as a fallback if the player like happens to back into the

store they're not going to see like an idle dumb AI not doing anything uh then on trigger play the ano uh there's a variable in the store um and this is like the core unit of logic for this whole encounter or this whole sequence is uh I total unpaid items or something like that uh which I just sort of count up as the player takes items and I decrement to zero when they pay uh there's a usable actor that sits on the little money bin and then uh every time they collect something I increment that I total unpaid items by one and as they approach the payment box um I'm check at like just generally I try and do this check at the last possible moment where something is set so when they get really close to the box I check if they have more than uh zero unpaid items at which point I activate the um pay money entity and um the other things like the coins themselves are just overridden by the pay money uh so you can if you actually do kind of aim in I'm not super fond of this you can like really zero in and get the coins uh so you can steal when you still have money to pay um but it's

really simple tools like it's basically a look trigger an integer counter uh item used events and a usable actor and um I think one of the strengths of what the level designer can do is I do a lot with like um very little unique content like this the honor store went in very late and it's sort of an example of U we called it like making soup where basically you've got this whole cupboard full of things you can use animations art and you just sort of can assemble them in different ways and I think that that's like an opportunity for designers particularly late in a project when there's not a lot of time and there's certainly not a lot of engineering time to create interactive sequences so this sequence really needed like a custom sign some one art asset um some repurposed animation I believe that actually started as a grenade toss uh when the guy flips the coin in uh which worked okay and actually wasn't a lot of work to repurpose into a coin flip uh there was a couple small pickup dialogue lines and a few text lines to localize which is like one of the cheapest changes you

can make or ads you can do very late in a game's development process um another example I wanted to look at um that was kind of an inspiration actually for the honor store is pick up the Can U which I find to be a really unique and memorable moment and I'm guessing maybe some of you know what I'm talking about without even mentioning the game to our reproductive sincerely thank you for writing concern of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses I obey with all this Associated fears for the of the species of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impul associate hopes and fears for the future of the I also detect some I love that moment just because

like similar to the honor System Store it's very early in the game it's before you've got a lot of core verbs available to you but it gives a player a really fun opportunity to just kind of say something about who they are decide how they want to inhabit the world like they have an option there to essentially kind of you know not make trouble heads down do what the bad guy says or they also have the option to um to cause trouble and the whole thing is really like zero consequence there's nothing afterwards that really carries along um from that scene and the guy's not going to kill you or anything um but I I do find it's like a really it's it's a cool opportunity and a cool way to sort of let the player Express something outside the core verb set that uh says something about the sort of player they want to be uh the setup for this I just opened it up in hammer and checked it out it's pretty I mean it's not I don't want to trivialize like I'm sure there was a lot of work that went into this and there was definitely some long days of bug fixing associated with it because it's kind of complicated um but it really comes down to the use of a couple touch triggers one on approach causes the guy to walk out as you get closer it causes him to knock the can over um there's delays that fire off once he does that

where he grows impatient with you and plays uh different animations and lines as he grows impatient uh just a little physics impulse uh which I love like the can flies off the thing because there's a tiny invisible explosion that happens behind it and um lastly there's like a collision trigger inside the can that's just waiting to be touched by the other can or inside the trash can so I encourage uh designers to do is find Opportunities like look for ways you can use the tools at your disposal to create these sorts of memorable experiences and um focus on ones outside maybe the core uh verbs of the game itself like building gameplay systems in level script is generally a bad idea and you're going to create a world of pain for yourself um but creating these little one-offs or low consequence kind of opportunities for the player is a pretty safe and interesting way that you can add flavor to your world uh the last thing I think I'm really low on time so I'm going to rush through this is missions and quests uh this is actually I think one of the most challenging things as a level designer is generally in shooters or action games like every Mission every Quest

everything you need to do comes down to some really simple kind of dumb things like push the button get the thing to the place kill the guy or wait for the timer uh so a challenge is sort of how do you make these things interesting and I'm going to actually give this in the form of a homework assignment for you all but it's play a video game so it's cool um and uh I would look at the overseer Campbell Mission from Dishonored it's like from the first main mission um uh in the game like sort of the first proper Mission and the goals are two of from the previous list one you need to get the thing which is get his journal and two eliminate him which is what I like there is it's not kill him uh it's eliminate and the success conditions if you play through the level are really like what those two things have um occurred and I'm pretty sure the way that works is it's really just two booleans that get flipped one when you grab the journal which is a systemic thing you can do when you pickpocket it from him or take it from his body and two has been eliminated which I believe is probably fired by either one any number of ways you can systemically kill him two a timer that goes off after after he drinks the poison however he

drinks the poison there's a lot of ways that that can happen or three has been hooked up to a torture machine which is like the or a branding machine I am at zero oh man all right sorry so the homework assignment is to just go through this and try all these different things and think about how it was actually implemented and how it was built um and uh a lot of it's like it's pretty simple little pieces that together form a really big hole uh so lastly um I would just called the level designers to use your tools things like hesis to try and make interactions that feel human and don't feel like it's just a computer switching off and on and also to try and inhabit the characters you're uh you're portraying and the players you're creating for so think about like when somebody is uh when you have a line to deliver would there be a pause or something like that and uh sorry that's it um if you have questions or want to chat I'm showing off my game on the show floor at epic's Booth uh and we'll be there all week so thank you my