Game Design: Theory & Practice- P16 docx

At this point, keep in mind that you are just creating the base layout for your level. You are not adding niceties such as lighting or texturing, nor are you concen - trating on making the geometry as pretty as possible. On this first pass you want to get the level to the point where the player can navigate through it and all of the locations the player will be able to go are accessible. This allows you to get a sense for whether the level’s layout feels right. step 4. Refine Architecture Until It is Fun At this point you need to repeat step three until your level starts feeling good and navigating it starts to be fun. For instance, if you are working on a first-person shooter, you should experiment with navigating your character around the 3D world, and see if the corners are fun to swing around, if the jumps are of just about the right difficulty, and if the areas come out at the size you had wanted them to. Take a look at the level as a whole and see if it makes sense and flows as you hoped it would. Once you actually spend time looking at and navigating the level as the player would, instead of just fiddling with it in the level editor, you stand a better chance of determining if your level is working out. If the level is not working out as you want, now is the time to make changes until it does. 428 Chapter 21: Level Design As game engines become more sophisticated, the amount of time required to build a level increases dramatically. For example, a professional level using the Quake III Arena engine will easily take weeks to complete. TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® step 5. Base Gameplay Now that your level feels right in terms of player navigation, it is time to start implementing the gameplay your level will use. Certainly you had the gameplay in mind through all of the steps of this process, but now is the time to see if it will actually work out as you had hoped. The best designers can come up with ideas and sketches for levels that successfully translate into fun levels in the end. Others start with a sketch, build some architecture, and when it comes time to add the gameplay, find they need to make some significant modifications to what they have already built. With experience as a designer comes the ability to predict whether abstract ideas will turn out to be any fun or not. Before you become experienced, however, the process involves a great deal of trial and error. A level’s gameplay consists of whatever actions the player is allowed to per - form in that level. In a first-person shooter such as Duke Nukem 3D, this means placing the monsters the player will shoot and the items the player will pick up. In a role-playing or adventure game, this is expanded to include whatever puzzles the player will need to solve, the characters to which the player may talk, and the quests on which these NPCs send the player. In a real-time strategy game, the designer will need to figure out starting unit placement and quantities for the player and his opponent, as well as whatever reinforcements may appear later in the level. In a way, sports and racing titles have an easier time with this step, since their gameplay is the same from level to level and therefore does not need much setup for a particular stadium or track. Chapter 21: Level Design 429 Setting up the gameplay in a level from a game like Duke Nukem 3D consists of placing monsters and weapons, and configuring puzzles. step 6. Refine Gameplay Until It is Fun Of course, the gameplay is what makes or breaks the game, so it is absolutely essen - tial that the designer repeat step five until the level is fun to play. Sometimes, refining the gameplay may take you all the way back to step number three. It may turn out that the area you thought would play well just is not suited to the capabili - ties of the AI. Or that the creature you thought would be able to spring out at the player from a fissure in a cliff does not really have enough space to hide. You may need to change the layout of your level to compensate for the problems you dis - cover once you start implementing the gameplay. For some designers, modifying existing level architecture to suit the gameplay can be quite a painful process. For instance, suppose a designer builds some archi - tecture she is happy with from an aesthetic standpoint. If the gameplay then does not work in that space, the designer may be reluctant to go back and rework that geometry and may instead settle for substandard gameplay. Of course, this is the wrong choice to make. As painful as it may be, in order to get the best gameplay you may need to throw out some of your work. This is why I suggested only mak- ing base architecture without refining it too much; that way making radical changes to the level will not mean that too much work was wasted. This is the step where your level really comes together and you start to get a sense of whether it is a success. Now you can take this space you created and really start to play in it. If you do not start enjoying yourself at this point, you may need to take a look at your level and ask yourself why it is not fun to play. In the worst case, you may realize that the level will never be fun, and as a result you need to start fresh. Ideally, however, this stage can be truly revelatory, as all of the work you put into the level starts to pay off. step 7. Refine Aesthetics Now that the level is playing well, you have an opportunity to make it look good as well. You may recall that in steps three and four we just set up base architecture, enough to allow the player to navigate and to give you a feel for the level. Now is the time to texture your level as needed, apply lighting effects, add decorative objects, and really flesh out your level from a visual standpoint. Many level design - ers spend the bulk of their time working on aesthetics for their levels, and certainly you should put in the time to make the level look as good as possible. But, as I have emphasized, it is crucial that you put off finessing the level until you are confident that the level plays well and that it accomplishes its gameplay objectives. Other - wise, you may waste your time making areas look nice which end up being scrapped. As you are finessing the level aesthetically, you must always remember not to break any of the gameplay you have already set up. 430 Chapter 21: Level Design step 8. Playtesting Now that all the parts of your level are in place, it is time to show it to some other people, let them play it, and get some feedback. Playtesting is a crucial part of game design, and level design is no different. These test subjects may include other mem - bers of your team, but should also include people less intimately involved with your project. A lot can be said for a fresh pair of eyes looking at your game and your level and giving you feedback on whether what you think is fun is also fun to them. Playtesting a level can be as easy as handing over a level to someone, asking him to play it, and having him tell you what he thinks. Another useful method, especially for level testing, is to actually be there with the tester when he tries to play your level and observe how he plays it. Does he get stuck in locations you had not thought of? Does he have trouble finding his way around? Do the gameplay sit - uations provide him with enough challenge? Watching other people play your level can be extremely educational and informative as to whether the level flows and plays well. In the worst case, playtesting may reveal that your level is not as fun to play as you had thought, and that major reworking will be necessary to make it fun. As a designer you must not be resistant when someone tells you your level is hard to navigate or confusing or just no fun. Certainly, get a second and third and fourth opinion on it, but when you start hearing the same complaints from a number of dif- ferent people, you need to realize that there may be some truth to what they are saying and that your level may need some serious reworking. Many designers who have invested a lot of time and energy in a level find it very difficult to then take criticism on their work. There is no denying that hearing someone tear apart a month’s worth of work can be disheartening, but this is the purpose of playtesting. You need to take your testers’ comments to heart, recognize the problems with your level, and start working on the level again. Thorough playtesting can often be the difference between a merely good level and a truly great one. Process Variations Of course, the process for level design I outline above is not the only way to make a level. Like the “dos” and “don’ts” of level design I described earlier, each level designer needs to find the method that works best for herself and her team. Many good designers use a method not entirely different from what I have outlined above, but with variations that better suit their own style of designing. One potentially useful variation is to incorporate steps three through six. Instead of laying out the entire level, you can start with a particular room or area. Then, before moving on to set up the rest of the level, try to set up gameplay in just that area. Once you are happy with how well that section plays, move on to setting up the rest of the level, adding gameplay to the areas as you create them. This way, Chapter 21: Level Design 431 if an area has to be enlarged to make the gameplay work properly, less work is wasted since the areas around may not have been built yet. As I mentioned before, it is important to be careful to not design yourself into a corner. You do not want to spend a lot of time working on the gameplay for a specific area only to have to remove it later since the rest of the level no longer fits in the space available. If you are going to set up gameplay for particular areas before the entire level is built, it makes the most sense to build the architecture for an entire, discrete play-space, such as a specific building or structure. Then you can make the gameplay work in that entire area before moving on to the next. Another useful idea is to incorporate playtesting earlier in the process, perhaps after step six. Once you have your level playable, have some people whose opin - ions you trust try playing the level. The aesthetics may not be fully refined yet, and you should certainly explain this to them as they play, but if you are able to get feedback at this early stage, you may be able to make important changes before you have spent a lot of time refining the aesthetics of the level. A possible drawback to testing the level this early is that others may not be able to understand that visually the level is not yet done. As a result they may get hung up on criticizing the appear- ance of your level instead of providing feedback about the gameplay. Be sure to communicate what type of feedback you are looking for at this stage and hope that the playtesters can see beyond the lack of fancy lighting effects. Testing at this early stage does not replace testing after the level is more final, but it may prevent some unpleasant surprises and can make the final testing go more smoothly. Who Does Level Design? Throughout this chapter, I have spoken as if you are responsible for all aspects of your level. Many development studios do still operate on the “one designer, one level” method of level design. This has many advantages, of course, since it helps to keep the levels focused. That one designer is constantly aware of what his level requires in terms of gameplay, art, and programming, and can keep that level on track. When it comes time to set up the level’s lighting, for instance, the designer will remember that he thought that gameplay in one part of the level would play best in the dark with disorienting flashing light. Having one person working on one level from start to finish helps to ensure the level has a consistency of vision that can lead to great gameplay. But the “one designer, one level” technique is not the only method which may work, and many developers have adopted more of a “team” approach to level design. If your team has one designer who is particularly good at making pretty architecture but is less skilled at getting the AI agents to work, it may make sense to have a different designer set up the gameplay on that designer’s levels. One designer may be particularly good at lighting effects, while another may be adept at 432 Chapter 21: Level Design the scripted sequences. You may want the sound designer to set up your sound effects, since he will be better at correctly placing the audio effects he created. Of course, as with any task that is divided among several people, when putting multi - ple personnel on a single level, you need to make sure that they are all “on the same page” in terms of what that level is trying to accomplish. For instance, the architec - ture designer may have built a canyon that he thought would be ideal for an ambush, but when the designer who sets up the gameplay comes along, he may not notice that particular canyon and might set up encounters in less optimal locations. Communication between the different people working on a particular level is essen - tial, just as it is between the programming, art, and design teams. As I stated previously, as games become more complex, it becomes necessary to divide tasks that used to be accomplished by one person between multiple peo - ple. As games continue to become more complicated, designers will specialize more and more, and having multiple people working on a single level will become increasingly common. Keeping the game focused on such a project will be quite a challenge, which emphasizes the importance of project leaders and lead level designers. However, as people specialize in a particular area of level design, the possibility exists that they can become better at their specific area of expertise as a result. Furthermore, if one person sets up the AI and gameplay for all of the levels in the game, those levels as a whole may achieve a greater gameplay consistency than if each level designer was setting up his own gameplay. If managed correctly, these highly specialized level designers can lead to better levels in the final game. Collaboration As games have grown in complexity, the number of level designers required for a particular game has increased. Whereas one designer used to be able to truly control every last facet of a game’s design, now a lead designer must find level designers she can trust to build levels which will make a significant contribution to the game’s design. Though a lead designer may be able to look over the shoulder of these level designers and do her best to direct the efforts, in the end she has delegated a large part of the gameplay’s creation to these invaluable members of her team. This can have both a good side, as more voices in the game’s design may make the game a more robust experience, and a bad side, as the clearness of artistic vision becomes diluted by so many different people working on the project. Such are the perils of most modern commercial game development. Chapter 21: Level Design 433 Chapter 22 Interview: Will Wright It is hard to measure the impact Will Wright’s game SimCity has had on the industry. At the time of its release in 1989, the game was so radically differ - ent from any other piece of interactive computer entertainment that for many years the project had trouble finding a publisher. Now the game’s influence can be seen in the countless “builder” games released every year. Sid Meier readily admits that SimCity was one of his primary inspirations in making Civilization. With his latest game, The Sims, Wright has come totally out of left field again with a game that he also had to fight to get made. While the majority of games released today take only evolutionary baby steps of improvement, with The Sims Wright has released something truly revolution - ary that represents the most original game design to be seen in years. Talking with Wright is an experience in itself, as one is instantly made keenly aware of why he has developed such brilliant and innovative games. 434 How did you first become interested in game development? I got totally into computers shortly after I bought an Apple II around 1980. I just got infatuated with games. As a kid I spent a lot of time building models, and I bought some of the very early games, such as the very first version of Flight Simu - lator with the wire-frame graphics. You had to write your own machine language patch to get it to run, that was funny. But just the idea that you could build your own little micro-world inside the computer intrigued me. So I saw it as a kind of model - ing tool. At some point I just got so into these things that I decided I would try to make one myself, and that was right around the time the Commodore 64 was first coming out. So I bought one of those, figuring that it would be better to start on a new machine where everybody was on a level playing field, because other people had learned the Apple II years before I decided to do this. So, I bought a Commo - dore as soon as it came out and just dove into it, and learned it as quickly as I could. And that’s what I did my first game on. So how did you come up with the design for Raid Over Bungeling Bay? Back then just about all the games were arcade games, you know. I had always loved helicopters, so I wanted to do a little helicopter game. And then I was looking at the Commodore. It was driven probably more by the technology than the game design side. I found that the Commodore had this really cool trick where you could redefine a character set, make it look like graphics, and then smoothly scroll it around the screen. So you could give the impression that you were scrolling over this huge bitmap, when in fact all you were doing is moving ASCII characters around on the screen. And when I saw that feature, I thought that would be really cool looking, because I knew the Apple couldn’t begin to move that much in the way of graphics around the screen that smoothly. So I designed the game around that feature in a way. I understand the game was much more popular in Japan than it was in the States. I think that was right when piracy was probably at its peak. We sold around 30,000 copies in the U.S., which was average for a game like that. But then every - body I’ve talked to who had a Commodore back then had played it. Whereas the same game on the Nintendo in Japan sold about 750,000 copies. It was a cartridge system, so there was no piracy. Do you still look back on the game positively? Oh yeah. I look back on it with fond memories, it was a learning experience. It was one of those times where you realize that the last ten percent, getting the game out the door, that’s the really hard part. And unless you plan for that last ten percent, it’s just a killer. So I learned a lot of lessons from it. And back then programming wasn’t nearly as elaborate as it is now. Every game was written by one person and Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 435 that game was about eight thousand lines of machine language. So you could totally control the memory and totally control the machine. It was a good learning vehicle. It’s kind of a shame that the programmers who learn to program nowadays are com - ing at it from a totally different point of view. You mean because they’re using higher level programming languages? Oh yeah. Which isn’t necessarily bad, I guess. But you still have the old hacks like myself. There were eight bytes of memory free on that machine when I finished that game, and I felt bad that I didn’t use those last eight. And there are a lot of tricks you do when you’re running out of memory, because the memory was the ultimate concern. There were some cool little tricks for that. I read that the level editing tool for Bungeling Bay was your inspiration for SimCity. It was a character set that actually described a bunch of islands with little roads and cities on them. And so there was such a big area that I developed my own little character editing program to draw this scene that I could scroll around really smoothly, like a paint program. I found that I was having so much more fun with the paint program than I was with the game that after I finished the game I kept playing with the paint program. And it eventually evolved into SimCity. So you wouldn’t cite any other games that inspired SimCity? I’d say the big- gest inspiration, if there had to be one, was the work of Jay Forester, who is con - sidered the father of system dynamics, and one of the very first people to use a computer for simula - tion. So when I started getting the idea for SimCity,I started going to the library and reading. He did a lot of his work back in the ’50s, working with very primitive computers and very primitive models, but yet he was the first person to try to simulate a city. And he did it with like twenty 436 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright SimCity variables: one was population, one was production, one was birth rate, stuff like that. Very simple models. System dynamics is a way to look at a system and divide it into, basically, stocks and flows. Stocks are quantities, like population, and flows are rates, like the death rate, the birth rate, immigration. You can model almost anything just using those two features. That was how he started system dynamics and that was the approach he took to his modeling. I uncovered his stuff when I started working on SimCity and started teaching myself modeling techniques. I also came across the more recent stuff with cellular automata, and SimCity is really a hybrid of those two approaches. Because his approach was not spatial at all, whereas the cellular autom - ata gives you a lot of really interesting spatial tools for propagation, network flow, proximity, and so forth. So the fact that pollution starts here, spreads over here, and slowly gets less and less, and you can actually simulate propagation waves through these spatial structures. So SimCity in some sense is like a big three-dimensional cellular automata, with each layer being some feature of the landscape like crime or pollution or land value. But the layers can interact on the third dimension. So the layers of crime and pollution can impact the land value layer. What made you think that such scholarly techniques could lead to something that people would find fun? At that point I wasn’t trying to build something that people would play for entertainment value. It’s more like I was just having fun doing this on my own. At the same time I was reading about urban dynamics, just on the theoretical side. And having this little guinea pig city on my computer while I was reading about the sub - ject made the subject so much more interesting. So I could read a theory and then try to figure out how to formalize it, code it, put it in the model, and see what the results of it were. At what point did you start to think it might be something that other people could have fun with? After about six months or so I started attaching some graphics to it. It was fairly abstract to begin with. And then I started thinking, you know, this might be an inter - esting game. I had actually done my first game with Broderbund Software, and I showed it to some people there and they thought it was pretty cool. They agreed to pick it up, and we had a contract for it and everything. And I worked on it for about a year to the point where it was where I wanted it to be. And they kept thinking it wasn’t finished. They kept saying, “When is it going to be a game? When is it going to have a win/lose situation?” It was very unusual for its time, and this was about five years before it was actually released. This was around 1985, and we didn’t actually release it until ’89. Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 437 [...]... think I did, because I was giving a talk at the Game Developer’s Conference, way back, and I decided that would be the name of my talk It was “Software Toys: The Intersection of Creativity, Empathy, and ” something Some high-falutin’ sounding talk How would you distinguish between a software toy and a game? Toys can be used to build games You can play games with toys But you can also engage in more... more recent version of the same idea, is that I tend to think of the games we do in more of a hobby kind of way, whereas most games are thought about more in terms of a movie or cinematic form Movies have a beginning and an end, there’s a climax, there’s one particular story line, and a lot of games are built more on that model Our games are more like a hobby, which you approach in a different way Like... more open-ended, people can play the game a lot of different ways And that’s where it’s become more like a toy Simulations in general give you a much wider game- space to explore There are probably no two cities in SimCity that are identical and created by different people Whereas, if you look at a game like Zelda, I’m sure there are tens of thousands of saved Zelda games that are identical Computationally... pretty serious game compared to many of your other titles Why did you opt for that approach? I didn’t want to do too much anthropomorphizing in the game One of the precepts of the game is that humans just happened to be the evolved intelligence on this planet It could have just as easily been trichordates or something else So I was really trying to avoid a human-centered approach to the game And, really,... light, easy to get into game, but you get more and more serious about it That’s why we had this little online database about ants, the little encyclopedia And the idea was to get people interested enough, just through the game, that they would actually start reading this little encyclopedia and a lot of it would pertain to the gameplay So you could actually learn new strategies for the game while at the... to try something where you were doing a 3D game inside of SimCity So that was the original premise for SimCopter They asked me: “Can you design a game where you’re doing something in 3D in SimCity? Whatever it is, driving around, flying around, whatever.” So SimCopter was the design I came up with It was the first 3D game I ever did, and actually the first 3D game a lot of our team ever did as well So... destruction was Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 443 so easy in this game, it was the creation that was the hard part And this is back when all of the games were about destruction After seeing that happen with so many people, I finally decided, “Well, I might as well really let them get it out of their systems, I’ll add some disasters to the game. ” And that’s what gave me the idea for the disaster menu Plus... hundreds of cities trading CompuServe was the first place where large collections of cities started to appear, not too long after the game came out The biggest complaint I’ve seen about SimCity, and I’ve seen this mostly from other game developers, is that since it is not a game and there aren’t any goals, it doesn’t hold the player’s attention very well I think it attracts a different kind of player In... being more open-ended than games We can use a ball to play a game such as basketball, or we can just toss the ball back and forth, or I can experiment with the ball, bouncing it off of different things So, I would think of toys as a broader category Also, toys can be combined I can strap Barbie to my R.C car and drive her around, thus making up a new activity by combining toys Games tend to be isolated... a lot of it would pertain to the gameplay So you could actually learn new strategies for the game while at the same absorbing all this cool information about ants The game reminds me of a very strange wargame It’s kind of like an RTS game In SimAnt we did some wacky things SimAnt in some sense was very experimental There were some weird things in there, like the mystery button On the interface, there’s . up the AI and gameplay for all of the levels in the game, those levels as a whole may achieve a greater gameplay consistency than if each level designer was setting up his own gameplay. If managed. their gameplay is the same from level to level and therefore does not need much setup for a particular stadium or track. Chapter 21: Level Design 429 Setting up the gameplay in a level from a game. monsters and weapons, and configuring puzzles. step 6. Refine Gameplay Until It is Fun Of course, the gameplay is what makes or breaks the game, so it is absolutely essen - tial that the designer