FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

General Principles of Level Design

If you have ever found yourself admiring the environment of a game or enjoying the way the game's challenges keep you guessing, you are appreciating the work of that game's level designer. The level designer creates not only the space in which the game takes place—its furnishings and backgrounds—but also the player's moment-by-moment experience of the game, and much of its emotional context. Successful level designers draw on fundamental design principles that apply to any kind of game, such as ensuring the player always knows his short-term goals and the consequences of risks, as well as design principles specific to the type of game being designed. Level designers work closely with the game designer to make sure layouts are appropriate for the storyline and to achieve the atmosphere and pacing required to keep players engaged in the game world. Level design will not be a quick and easy process if you do it right. This chapter will identify 11 steps that the level designer takes, from initial handoff to user testing. The final section details problems to avoid in the level design process, including the key directive to never lose sight of your audience.

What Is Level Design?

Chapter 2, "Design Components and Processes," described level design as the pro­cess of constructing the experience that will be offered directly to the player, using components provided by the game designer. Note that the terms game designer and level designer are not interchangeable but refer to separate roles that, on larger devel­opment teams, are almost always played by different members of the team. In the rest of this book, the word you means the reader as game designer, but in this chapter only, you indicates the reader as level designer.

Level designers create the following essential parts of the player's experience:

■ The space in which the game takes place. If the game includes a simulated space, as most do, then level design includes creating that space using a 2D or 3D modeling tool. While game designers determine what kinds of things will be in the game world, level designers determine precisely what features will be in each level of the game world and where these features will be. Level designers take the game designer's general plans for levels and make them specific and concrete.

■ The initial conditions of the level, including the state of various changeable features (Is the drawbridge initially up or down?), the number of artificial opponents the player faces, the amounts of any resources that the player controls at the begin­ning of the level, and the location of resources that may be found in the landscape.

■ The set of challenges the player will face within the level. Many games offer challenges in a linear sequence; if so, level designers determine what that sequence will be, construct a suitable space, and place the challenges within it. In other games, the challenges may be approached in a number of different possible sequences or any order at all; see the later sections "Layouts" and "Progression and Pacing" for further discussion.

■ The termination conditions of the level, ordinarily characterized in terms of victory and/or loss. In many games, levels can only be won but not lost, and in a few, such as the default mode in SimCity, levels can only be lost and never won.

■ The interplay between the gameplay and the game's story, if any. The writer of the story must work closely with the level designer to interweave gameplay and narrative events.

■ The aesthetics and mood of the level. Whereas the game designer and art director specify the overall tone of a level and artists create the specific models and textures, level designers take the general specifications and decide how to implement those plans. If the plan says, "Level 13 will be a scary haunted house," the level designers decide what kind of a house and how to make it feel scary and haunted.

Level designers normally construct all these parts using tools created specifically for the purpose. Some games, including Warcraft III and Half-Life 2, actually ship their level design tools along with the game, so players can expand and customize the game world; if you own one of these games, you can practice level design by using those tools.

Level design could easily be the subject of an entire book. However, this chapter concentrates on introducing the general principles and the process of level design.