PORTFOLIO

PLANNING:

Story and level design are inextricably linked

 

Stories essentially come in three parts:

• Thesis: introduction to the setting, the characters, and the hero

• Antithesis: where the conflict and villains are introduced; amounts to the majority of the story

• Synthesis: where there is some form of good or bad resolution

Just like in a three-act play, film scripts, and most forms of entertainment that come from storytelling.

 

With this in mind, questions to ask when planning:

• What is required by the story or plot?

  • Example: Finding out who Jeane is in Bayonetta and what your ties to Luka are, introducing more mechanics, and developing the theme of the game.

• What are my set-pieces?

  • Example: Racing a river of lava down the streets of Vigrid, “torture” and “gigaton” attacks with Gomorrah , the battle with Fortitudo

• What metrics am I bound by?

  • Each area that you design needs to take into account things like the player's movement speed, the size of the player, the size of the monsters, jump heights, and so on. Therefore, it would be unwise to create a chase-sequence with the wall of lava traveling at the speed which panther-form Bayonetta runs at, making the section impossible to complete by regular means.

 

Planning Paper/Digital maps:

• Once all criteria have been considered, create multiple, incredibly detailed maps on paper or digitally, assembling all appropriately planned sections

  • This allows critique before effort is spent on final implementation

  • This map must also contain the explicit “Critical Path” the player must traverse to complete the level.

 

PRODUCTION:

From here, designers must be consciously aware of the typical reasons people play games in the first place, and which niches they want their levels to fill.

There are the necessities of:

• Challenge: People who want to conquer something tough to prove their mettle.

• Entertainment: People looking for a good, fun time.

• Escapism: People looking to project onto an avatar and “live” in an alternate world.

• Uniqueness: People who want to experience something new or unlike anything they’ve seen before.

Some levels can encompass all or just one of these things, but usually the best levels use many different kinds of combinations.

 

When finally creating the level, designers must also decide how the level will interact with the overarching story of the game and decide how information will be portrayed. This can be done either:

• Explicitly: called out by text or speech, like a cut-scene

• Implicitly: told by the environment through visual cues, like having relevant, iconic buildings knocked over as scenery

• Emergently: told by the player as they go through the level, such as guns-blazing or a pacifist run

 

Once the storytelling portions are laid out, designers can use other cinematography methods to drive even more feeling and weight behind them, increasing their impact on the player, such as:

• Lighting: Using dim or bright light to obscure portions of the level to create player suspense as to what has been placed in those areas.

• Sound Design: Musical cues or crescendos at key moments or areas within the level, or distorting audio to create the illusion of being underwater or a low-atmospheric conditions

• Framing: Use of blurred cameras during dramatic sequences or making objects glow to indicate their importance to the player

• Points of Interest: Use of changes in the environmental state to draw attention to scenes or specific areas around the level, like explosions telling a player that they should either head toward or away from that area.

  • This can also be used to focus players along the critical path, and relieve frustrations if a player gets lost at a specific point, preserving the natural “flow” of the level
     

It’s also good to keep in mind that “Good level design tells the player what to do, but not how to do it,” like having a door at the end of three platforms: anyone can tell you to jump across the platforms, but you don’t need to if you’re in the process of explaining that mechanic to a player.

 

POLISH:

Game/Level Testing: Finally, once most, or all, of the proposed features are implemented into a final level, there must be extensive work put into making sure the mechanics and environments coexist without any major screw-ups (bugs). Game testers should methodically run through every aspect of the game’s levels and systems to make sure as few mistakes make it into the final product as possible.

• It is also almost absolutely necessary for level testers to be separate from the design teams with specific instructions as to what to look out for. If testers are part of the development team, they will unconsciously avoide acting out of the ordinary within the gamespace, making their feedback largely unreliable.

 

There is also the aspect of replayability: the incentive for a player to play the same levels more than once. The use of awards at the end of games and leaderboards can drive some players who are part of the challenge niche to strive for the high score in some levels, adding more enjoyment to the game as a whole.

 

Another strategy (the MetroidVania model) also uses ancillary portions of levels being only navigable when later on in the story, making levels become more interesting the second or third time through.