Radiator Yang's Interview with yours truly

There have been mild suggestions that I update this blog. Such efforts have resumed.

In the meantime, Please enjoy this interview piece by Robert Yang wherein we discuss a whole host of designerly things, if you didn't catch it on Rock Paper Shotgun.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/01/level-with-me-jack-monahan/

Level Design Primer: Notes on Playtesting

Playtesting is like working out--you can go a long time telling yourself you don't need it, and then when you finally get around to doing it it will hurt so much you'll probably stop again for too long.
But resist the temptation to quit. Understand that testing is an inextricable part of good design; what you're making is for the player after all.


You Are Not Your Work

I feel a little silly parroting this again, but it's worth it if gets through to just a few more people. Remember the lesson of every teary-eyed critique in art classes the world over--you are not your work.
It is of you, but it is not you. While you may be deeply invested in it, once you have made something it is out there in the world and separate from you. No matter how coarsely phrased a criticism may be, remember it is a reflection of the work and not you personally.
There are creative professionals that get by without learning this but boy does it cause them no end of grief. The pride and joy of creation I think must necessarily follow with detachment; a distanced, even clinical appraisal.
While I've found this kind of professional detachment also tends to shave the peaks of euphoric highs during development, it's more than worth it by pulling out of the gutting lows. You can be still be passionate and excited about your work without taking the emotional rollercoaster that comes from not being able to separate your work from yourself.


Conducting The Test

[This is assuming you're using what Will Wright calls a "Kleenex tester," a player without prior experience with the game who will likely not test again, rather than a professional or regular tester.]

Make sure your tester feels comfortable enough to talk freely, but do not get too friendly with them. Exerting the social pressures of a new acquaintance (or invoking your friendship with someone you know) means getting polite answers instead of useful ones. People will likely downplay or politely lie to your face to avoid an uncomfortable situation.

I usually start with a very short capsule summary of the game and it's premise (no more than a few sentences), along with any mission-critical info if they they're playing a level that's not the beginning of the game. I also make sure they are able to set any control preferences before they begin (though I don't know why we tolerate your kind, EDSFers. Go back to the Moon.)

Then it's time to prime the tester to think outloud. I'll say something like the following:

"What I'd like you to do is say anything that comes to mind while you're playing, things like "I'm frustrated," or "this part is cool."  Don't worry about offending me. If something is really bad you're doing me a favor by mentioning it, it'll help make the game better. Ask questions if they come up while you're playing, or if something isn't clear say so and I'll respond to everything--but after the test is over. While you're playing just enjoy yourself, pretend I'm not here."

Be very aware of how much physical positioning factors into the tester's comfort level. Grab your notebook and sit several feet back, as far back as you can off to the side and well outside their peripheral vision. Making sure they don't feel like you're hovering is important--nobody likes that feeling, and testing can already feel a little weird for most people already. Giving the player headphones can also help them feel less self-conscious. You can still come up and fix a show-stopping flaw or restart the level as necessary, but generally try to make yourself invisible for the duration of the test. You're there to observe.


Slow Motion Trainwreck

And here comes the hard part. Now you get to see all your brilliant plans laid to ruin as what you thought was simple and straightforward to the player is anything but. Try to take it in stride; now when I playtest I almost feel like a classic Freudian analyst, or a scientist regarding a lab trial. Clinical detachment is useful here.

Once the level is out of your hands there's nothing you can do to help it if something goes wrong. So if during the playtest something does happen (such as the surprisingly common scourge of "player error"), short of a crash or other complete show-stopper, you're just going to have to grin and bear it. This can be one of the most punishing aspects of a playtest but this is your lot. What's hardest to take often ends up the most useful information.

So pay close attention. Get impressions down immediately, but make as many notations about specific problems as you can. Missed cues, objectives that are ignored or unseen, key dialogue that doesn't seem to be heeded, horribly unfair firefight, collision problems, the player wandering off the map--all of the above might happen in a single test.
    This is your chance to see your world through someone else's perspective, so keep your eyes on the screen and write down any comments they make. Make a mental record of where they're looking--if there's an important element that never crossed their sightline, why or how did it happen? Did you misjudge the clarity of your layout?
As we talked about in the previous LDP article, no one tester's word is law, their experience necessarily represents just a single small data point. Yes, a single test can reveal a lot of issues that obviously should be fixed, but generally speaking you're looking for patterns from multiple sessions; reworking too much based on a single test can be very counter-productive. Balance your observations with instinct.

***

Regular testing will likely result in a greater knowledge of your own bias/hyperawareness of the level. What you feel like is "really overdoing it" might just be noticeable to the player, and the touches you consider "subtle" will probably escape notice entirely.
So test early, test often--it will get easier, and you'll have to redo so much less work if you get playtesters in at the earliest opportunity. Your sense of what works and what doesn't will naturally sharpen. You'll find yourself building level elements that anticipate typical player behaviors, rather than having to come and fix them after a test.

Level Design Primer: Starting A New Level

When a modern FPS level takes weeks or months of production time it's probably a good idea to approach a new one with care. What follows is a summary of the six most important lessons I've learned so far about starting new levels.

1. Plan On Paper

"It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator."
- Paul Rand

Shigeru Miyamoto and his team first designed the classic Super Mario Brothers levels on long paper scrolls. I find little hope of building a space as sublime and iconic as World 1-1 by bringing technology to bear too early--so don't open up the editor just yet. Start on paper. Try to give yourself (or beg your superiors for) enough time to think and to plan; it will pay off later.
Apologies for sounding like your gradeschool art teacher, but your most important tools are that piece of paper and your imagination. Especially in a production environment, some notes and a whiteboard or a few simple drawings can launch incredible ideas. A hundred different scenarios can be suggested and discarded before a single BSP brush snaps to the grid. Run with the ideas that intrigue you and don't worry too much about technical constraints just yet.
Get comfortable with thinking on the page; write down and sketch your internal dialogue. Don't trust that just because an idea is so awesome it means you'll remember it, or remember it in the same way. Buy a notebook or sketchbook if you don't already have one. As I point out in my article on character design, there's no need to get hung up drawing quality. Everybody can draw well enough to help develop layout ideas--simple lines and boxes will do just fine.
Brainstorm your approach to the level, specific sequences you might build around, hooks that make the experience of your level unique. Record them and then set them aside as you work. We'll cover the discipline of ideation in another update, but the important point is to not get married to the first ideas that crop up. You want to do enough thinking and doodling that you have the pick of the litter of many ideas in layout and encounters, not just being forced to execute on a small handful.
Try to complement this early planning stage with talking through your ideas with others. Kick them around with friends and coworkers whose sensibilities you trust. Try to get some feedback during all stages of development, even (especially) from people who you don't always agree with. George Lucasing it up with your own troop of yes-men is more comfortable but will ruin the work over time. Ideas get better--or at least the bad ones flushed out faster--once you try them out.

[We'll also leave out talking about research for the time being, but suffice it to say I am a strong proponent of research-driven approach to pre-production.]


2. Establish Scale

As you begin to rough in your level layout in the editor, one of your first priorities will be to establish scale. There's a reason why development textures for many games will have real-world comparison measurements all over them: you'll want constant markers and reference points to register the scale of your space.
With Darkest of Days there were several levels I sculpted the initial terrain for or also did a good amount of set-dressing, but did not script, and these are the levels I am most disappointed with because they are simply too large. The size of and therefore pacing of the levels are intrinsically distorted because I did not pay close enough attention to scale.
Terrain/outdoor spaces make it especially difficult to keep a grip on scale. You may think you can judge the scale of that hill you just raised, but in the abstract space of the editor it could be 20 feet or 200 feet.
For their part, indoor spaces also tend to require exacting consistency in calibration. Failure to do so will make for levels that will at best feel slightly "off" to the player, even if they can't articulate why.
Once you have created a terrain mesh or set laid brushes for your floorplan, immediately place objects in the world that you are intimately familiar with. Use the player character or as close to person-sized NPC as is available, cars and trucks, anything you know well. The closer they are to real-world objects the better, in order that you can fix them and your level in relation to real-world scale.
Here the first person perspective can be deceptive. your level can look normal sized while moving around in it alone because of no comparative cues--so be sure to place NPCs. In a pinch even a box, scaled to 6 foot high or so, will prove useful.
I recently did some work in UDK which was very interesting, because the tutorial/demo content is based off of Unreal Tournament 3. When a game is based on a traditional multiplayer deathmatch environment, double-jumps and all, objects and space are usually blown out a little to make room for the action.
A chainlink fence asset that I assumed to be about 8 feet tall turned out to be nearly 20 feet tall, skewed to the needs of UT3. Get to know your game's scale conversion between in-game units and the real world, so you can more accurately judge size relationships as you work.
Resist the temptation to leave obvious problems or faults in that "you will fix later." You will regret it. Small oversights become catastrophes with time. Once you're farther into building your level, recalibrating scale may become difficult or impossible without completely rebuilding.



3. Play and Pace

Play your level constantly, paying close attention to how the layout feels.
The map is not the territory, even in a virtual world. What you see or think you see while floating around godlike within your creation has little if anything to do with the experience of the player, which is all that matters. As soon as you've got anything to walk on, place scale references and start playing it.
Pace through your entire level's playable area/intended player path in real time. Do not cheat. However long your level should take to play through to completion, you should spend close to that amount of time pacing through every moment, every fight and puzzle, long before they exist to anyone else.
Go so far as to play out mock firefights, even with no enemies and nothing but a platform separating you from the endless void. Look at the outline of your level and consider the ramifications. Is this run-up too long, too short? Does the player have enough time to appreciate the clever visuals you have planned over to the left there--in fact, will it cross their sightline at all?
Changes that come from this initial read of the layout are critical. Over time, a level begins to harden and set like concrete. The accretion of set-dressing, scripting, sounds and AI behavior steadily freeze what at the start is fluid, so take advantage of it while you can.
The further into the process you get, the harder major changes become. As with planning, do not be afraid to make sweeping changes or start over. At this stage it costs a fraction of the time and energy it will to change later on.

When I build levels I pace through them obsessively, over and over; imagining the player's line of travel through the level as a kind of furrow I dig with my feet. As I walk through the level over and over, the furrow deepens and widens into a path, graded and accommodating.
When the player arrives the level will be "paved" in this way, suitable for him to travel and puzzle and battle in. Problems are anticipated and corrected by tirelessly pacing through the world at every stage of development, reducing the likelihood of playtesters discovering unknown corners, snagging on jagged edges unencountered by the designer. You built this world, you should know it better than anyone else.



4. Build Up The Canvas

This advice is also rooted in experience of making art. When painting it's very easy to get excited about a particular detail--an eye, an ear of a portrait--but then find yourself stymied, lost for how to finish the rest of the piece. You have a single excellent detail drawn but now you are worried because it doesn't seem to fit with the rest, you have no idea how to proceed--worse yet you've been captured by preciousness, wanting to preserver all the hard work you've just done, scared to ruin it.
Level designers reading this may recall similar experiences of building a room or a particular sequence to perfection, and then stare at the rest of the unfinished level with dread, unsure of how to continue.
To combat this, remember to "build up the canvas" equally. In painting, this means to develop the whole picture to roughly the same detail level in successive passes.
In level design, this means resisting the temptation to build, script, light, texture-align and set-dress a single room to finished quality and then move on. To be sure, some successive room-to-room building will occur but try not to. Your work will go more smoothly by building with successive passes, increasing the resolution of the entire design as evenly as possible. Not only will this help keep you from stalling out, but it increases consistency and makes practical sense in a production environment, allowing for more representative playtests sooner.
This principle is also applied to marker rendering techniques taught for product designers. Say your boss or your client suddenly wants the design now, not tomorrow or next week. By building the detail of the piece in successive passes, you can rest assured that if asked for early (or if it takes longer than expected) while it may not be overall to the finish level you wanted, it will be consistent and look equally "done" to the client.

Using this strategy the level always close to progressively higher states of "done". This will help you from getting caught setting a slower pace for building your level than you'll be able to complete on time.



5. Track Moment To Moment

Once you have the broader strokes, the pace and rhythm of the level right, you can step in and refine and develop the details. People remember and relate in terms of stories; refining the moment to moment narrative of your level is an excellent way to make it memorable.
By this I mean you should consider how a player would narrate, in simple terms, discrete events in your level. "I sniped the officer, crossed the bridge, set fire to the gas tank and saw some cool jets fly over, then got inside the mech and blew up a building."
A minute of gameplay is a year, three minutes of any one activity seems a lifetime. Breaking down your level in terms of these smaller sequences will identify problems and help suggest more discrete moments and encounters, avoiding tedium or repetition.
Clarify specific experiences within the level you want the player to have. where do they take cover? if they take time to look around, what details are they rewarded with? What might be found by carefully searching the scenery? Levels will often have a dialogue script, but what is the action script for the player like?

Take a look at your level and see if you can construct a basic narrative from the experience. Does the scenery blend together a bit too much? Ask your next playtester to briefly describe in basic terms what they did/what they saw, and see how easy it is for them. The more discrete moments or sequences they can recall, the better.


6. Factor In Testing

This is one of the most important aspects of level design, of game design as a whole: test early, test often.
Other people playtesting your level needs to happen almost as much as your own in-game appraisal of the work. The level is ultimately to surprise, delight, and challenge the player, not to hold a mirror to your shining glory and genius. You will have no understanding of how successful your level is--or how potentially rotten and recycled--until other people play it. Often the difference between good and great levels are just how much more thoroughly tested the latter are.
I feel the need to qualify this carefully given the rise of a certain perception of playtesters end up "dumbing down" great levels and mechanics, particularly for console games. There is a kernel of truth to this; occasionally games have been altered for the worse by improperly factored testing.
We must remember that the designer is not the player and the player is not the designer.
I could expand this key concept--a variation on what Warren Spector considers the "co-authorship" of games--into an entire article on its own, but the point is that we cannot let player feedback alone override good sense and instinct.
The player is not the designer. Playtesters are usually filled with a lot of worthwhile suggestions, but these should be considered with care. Watching a player play, monitoring their action directly says far more than they will tell you went wrong or right.
When you observe playtests you are looking for patterns, the larger and more varied the sample the better; unless hugely positive or hugely negative, no one single playtest should too strongly skew your perception of your level design.

But there again, the designer is not the player. There is no greater criteria for a level's quality than how well the player enjoys it. All that we do comes to nothing if it is not done with the player in mind. Developing good habits and remaining acutely aware of how your new level is taking shape can take a lot of the pain and frustration out of a long and sometimes maddeningly complex task.

***

Tomorrow: the playtesting bonus round. Detailed description of my own methods, an argument for playtesting protocols, and why conducting disciplined playtests will make you a better designer. Quoth Aubrey: GET PUMPED.

Level Design Primer: Keep It Wide

I credit this rule to a friend of mine, Drew Risch. Mr. Risch was a professional architect for some time before going on to do level design on such titles as Planetside, designing several of the base layouts. Since then, Drew has recovered his sanity and traded in level design for effects work--but his design mentoring always proved invaluable.

This rule comes from the early days, where FPS players lept and bounded like strange, violent gazelles. Our younger readers may not know how different the early games were; for example, the running speed of the original Doom Guy in real terms is said to be about 60 mph. He could keep pace with a rocket fired parallel to him.
With so much play centered around mobility/maneuverability, a fun level was one that gave you enough space to work, but not so big as to be slack. You need room to circle-strafe, clearances to rocket-jump to. We may not be doing much of that in modern FPSes, but it's still important as ever to give the player room.

Boxed In

Recall the refrigerator box: the player is more unwieldy and blinkered than he thinks he is. Because of this, the level designer is called upon to build spaces around him that appear realistically scaled, but also tailored to mask the player's shortcomings. The simplest formulation of this design maxim? Keep It Wide.


This is to say, give the player room to maneuver/direct fire, and give enough space for clear visual navigation. A necessary corollary to this: the more players that play together in a space, the more room is necessary. Like all design rules, there are good reasons to violate this rule which we'll get to, but consider it good general practice.

Let us consider two scenarios--one from Valve's own Left 4 Dead campaign No Mercy, the other an excellent work in progress custom campaign, Highway to Hell.
Both campaigns begin in an apartment complex, but there are some crucial differences.

No Mercy: Bill is puzzled that the apartment's hallways are so generously sized, but knows he's got room to maneuver.

Highway to Hell: the survivors tend to see more of each other than zombies in some hallways. No place for a shotgun.

The setting and quality of set dressing are nearly identical, layouts very similar. One of the few small differences is that in Highway to Hell's apartment building, there are some extremely tight spaces for 4 players to fight through effectively. In L4D all players can freely clip through each other, which eliminates a lot of common related issues of this kind, but not all--friendly fire is still dealt. Which is exacerbated if players don't know the common practice of crouching if out in front.

No Mercy: Maybe a little oversized for the kind of mid-level apartment it would appear to be, but it gives room to play. No one joyfully shouts "this is so realistic!" when they're not having fun. (Outside of ArmA2 players, of course.)

Play through the beginning of No Mercy, paying attention to horizontal space. Most areas are built to accompany at least two abreast at any point--meaning if the two forward most players kneel, this is clearance enough for all four players to fire forward.
Not only does it make the game's stated emphasis on co-operative play viable, but it makes navigation easier as well--the more spatially restrictive an area is, often the harder it can be to clearly navigate. (In another update, I'll elaborate specifically on navigation considerations.)



The above shot is perhaps the diciest example from Highway to Hell. Most of the way through the map the survivors will wind their way through a meticulously recreated gas station.
The sense of place is very real, possibly to a fault: this communicating hallway is narrow and has a whopping six doors connected to it--to the front of the store, the back door, the break room, the restroom, and so on. While this is laid out realistically, suggesting it was all modeled on an actual gas station, it's also a death trap.
It's deceptively hard to move around in and direct fire, and if the Director throws down on the players through one of these connecting rooms--as it is wont to--the players might have a very hard time escaping, much less as a group.

I haven't had the pleasure of playing this map in actual co-operative play, only with bots, so I can't speak to whether the experience of it is panic inducing or annoying. The rub is that these two kinds of experiences live in very close proximity to each other.

Exceptions

This brings me to exceptions to the rule. Valve violates "Keep It Wide," that they otherwise strictly observe, in several key points throughout L4D. There is a storm drain sequence where it's obvious the players will only be able to advance in single file, a dangerous proposition in a world of zombies.
The above communicating hallway layout from Highway to Hell may also be an exception: despite being uncomfortably narrow to move and direct fire in, it is also small, and well connected, and veteran players should be alert enough in such a tight space. (Designing with the 360 version in mind would mean this area is simply out of the question, however.)

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to think it is an exception. Though I would note that the navigational issues (difficult to orient in such a nondescript corridor with so many doors) would be helped by introducing orienting details: restroom decal and possibly some chinsy art hanging on the opposite wall.

But the truth is, like every design decision made, you won't know until you get playtesters. If this area is consistently panicking players or making for some tense little shootouts, it's worth keeping, but if it's producing disproportionate casualties or an untoward difficulty spike, then it's worth revising.

Any design decision that violates best practices for level design in your game must be carefully considered. Is it breaking a rule in a fun, tension-inducing way, or is it doing it in a completely unfair, obnoxious way? You won't know without playtesting.

But rest assured that you'll address many aggravating issues with playtesting before they start if you remember "Keep It Wide."

[This was by no means intended to pick on the designer "Unlawful Combatant." Highway to Hell is absolutely professional quality work, and once its polished and completed it will rival or surpass a number of the original campaigns in the game; readers with L4D should check it out and see just how many of the previously mentioned Level Design Primer concepts they can spot (hint: basically all of them).]

Design Reboot: Torch

What to do with Alone In The Dark?

Pictured: catwalk over electrified sludge, spider enemies, pipes.

The original was of the very first survival horror games. It went through increasingly abstruse sequels, until suffering the double indignity of an Uwe Boll movie adaptation and then a high profile reboot that was the most overstuffed hot mess of a game I can think of.

A short list of crimes:

• control shenanigans
• inventory system designed via divination/casting reptile bones
• camera shenanigans
• "cinematic" storytelling
• mysterious powers
• spider enemies
• tentacle goop with mysterious powers
• "cinematic" driving sequence
  
• NYC-centrism

The game can't be faulted for a clear and admirable desire for innovation, despite its control issues. On the other hand, it's a posterchild for modern, multiplatform bloatware that overreaches in just about every category (if I want "cinematic," I'll go to the movies). Alone in the Dark seems like an ideal candidate for the "back to basics" treatment.

Jack White, of the White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather, is a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to making music in the studio. He's outspoken about wishing that bands were forced to make their first album on nothing more than a 4-track--and while with any such sweeping generalization it's easy to think of reasons why it's not the best idea, I find it an aspirational sentiment. Something about nailing the basics before you get fancy.


Disparition - Timişoara

And in that spirit we frame today's design reboot: Torch. Take away the crawlie things, the Powers, mysterious past, the glowing tentacles that grab NPCs in scripted sequences, fixation on another medium's way of storytelling, scrape it all out and rinse with the garden hose--until you are only left with being alone, in the dark.


Torch is a game about delving deep into our most basic fears. Home invasion, kidnapping. There are no cutscenes, no long dialogues with celebrity voices. You play a string of characters that need to survive the worst night of their lives.

[A key inspiration: the film The Strangers. In his directoral debut, Brian Bertino takes a small cast, a single location, and sets about wreaking havoc with little more than mounting dread and suggestive framing. (Do not watch this movie with anyone who is even a little bit scared of home invasion.)]

Just as horror movies benefit from minimalist production, maximalist dread, Torch would be built from the two titular elements of survival horror. Probably near-third person or first person, set in small but densely constructed and detailed levels. The control layout would be adequate but unfussy, but this would be offset by a positively austere use of HUD elements (ideally none).
The game opens directly from the desktop with a black screen while loading, no splash or title screens. A text-only menu on black background. Players choose from a branching list of progressively worst-night-of-my-life scenarios of various ordinary characters, given first names only, a one or two word bio. Ellen, homemaker. Alex, dentist.

One of the first stories presented is being at home at night during a break-in. Barring aggressive play, it should be reasonably easy to "win," but the player has been given a taste of the atmospheric dread to come--NPC assailants vary their numbers, start locations and motivations on every playthrough.
Other early scenarios are a walk home at night, finding the car in a dim parking garage. A laundry list of sequences based on exactly the things we're most anxious about in life.

Through the shorter introductory scenarios, the player masters the essential survival skills: the flashlight, the small combat sequences (dictated by the abilities and identity character they're playing and weapons available), but mostly the timing/decisionmaking, situational awareness. Learning to take careful cues from the environment to survive. Running.

Soon the most difficult scenarios unlock. Waking up in the den of a serial killer (tonally dark but without any overtones of sexual abuse) with all but locked doors and needing to escape--you can try the phone, but how do you tell the police where you are? Violent home invasion, and the like.

Upon it's small, PC digital-only release, Torch is judged with a very favorable 83/100. Critics enjoy the freshness of the back to basics, no-frills approach to harrowing situations. The game doesn't take many hours on paper to complete, but played with headphones and the lights off, most players voluntarily take their time savoring the panic.

The Knight-Errand of the Modern FPS

Working on Darkest of Days I was slow to incorporate a common hallmark of modern shooters, the Objective text. An objective is completed, a new directive takes its place. Perhaps it was that my great intelligence is only rivaled by my laziness, or perhaps it was some internal sense of how player agency has been whittled away to near-nothing in our shooters.

How did we get to the point where the shooter experienced was meted out with bullet points on a to-do list, instead of just bullets?



Once I was a space marine, feeling each Giger-esque tech panel for secret stores; now I am a pizza boy with the Doom guy's armored pecs and inexplicably bare sixpack drawn on the front of my t-shirt, taking orders from NPCs.

Take a moment to compare: play Doom's E1M1 to E1M3 again and then any modern shooter of your choice.
Chances are the navigational complexities of the game are equal to or far less sophisticated than Doom, even 10 years or more removed from that seminal work.
So while the operational assumption has rarely changed--get to the exit, kill everything along the way--many elements are far simpler: health, weapon logistics, and direction of travel. Adult supervision.

For this marginal increase of variety and novelty with which the player is presented in the game, we pay the cost having some buzzing kindergarten teacher in the ear and the loss of even illusory volition.

In my experience as a designer in this mode, basically any time you want the player to shift modes, you send him a new objective and/or maybe get an NPC to bug him.
Then the same NPC might end up giving away the solution seconds later to the just introduced problem, because the modern player has been cowed into this passive state and can become enormously frustrated or confused the moment anything like unprompted choice or decision-making appears.
Player choice extinction.

[A small mercy with Darkest of Days is that early on we made the decision to completely forgo the radio earpiece convention. Handy as it is to cue and clue (or goad and cajole) the player, it is a lazy crutch. We may not have escaped the modern "go here, do this" ping pong player, but at least we didn't give the player a sassy or spunky NPC yammering away constantly to point out the obvious.]

Illustration derived from Ian Albert's excellent Doom Map visualizations.

Open up E1M1 again and consider it from modern vantage: first we'd have the obligatory intro cutscene, naturally, and assuming that we'd start the player in the same point, think of the additional time spent where the radio crackles and then your space marine's situation is explicated for a few minutes more.

Then we'd tutorialize the first few enemy encounters. A short, difficult-to-fail "cinematic" style chase sequence might follow. Exploding barrels explained at length to no one in particular. Then, like a newly released ex-con, the player is allowed a probationary period of fun.

The apparent tradeoff is a series of varied gameplay situations that, like carnival games, the player will be allowed to enjoy to distract from an apparently wearisome core gameplay.
Here's a vehicle sequence. Get ready for a quick time event. Surmount this obstacle (but not too creatively). Woah, get ready for a cutscene, because this animation was deemed far too expensive to produce for you to miss.
Protect this NPC with a mission failure condition if he dies, only to watch his death in a cutscene immediately after.


The heart of the problem to me are these two conflicting design impulses: providing a player a specific (often "cinematic") experience, versus cultivating player choice and expression. Obviously no one game is completely one way or another, there is a broad spectrum of possibility and room for all.
I am happy to play "cinematic" styled games, but not to the complete exclusion of games built for the player. All too frequently I seem to be experiencing the outlet of a stymied screenwriter, not a game designer.

Warren Spector, in his Master Class series at the University of Texas, characterized games at their best a co-authored experience between designer and player.
This is what games do, a shared medium where the experience can only come from the two working in concert.

Games need both the designer and the player; much as an author needs a reader's imagination to give his characters life, so too the designer needs a willing subject to make believe, to give the world a spark, for it is for the player the world was constructed. Games are about interactivity, but this core designer-player interplay is often overlooked.

This is not the oft-made call for all games to feature sandbox gameplay, which is not actually the natural endpoint of game design evolution. (Chess is not improved by being played on a 128x128 square board.)


Rather, it is a call for designers to stay faithful in their role of collaboration with the player to create an experience. Rigorous, regular playtesting helps keep designers honest, as does asking this simple question: "Is this for me, or for the player?"
Is the game a railroad through a laughable third rate imitation of a film script, or something that not only rewards but necessitates the player's involvement?

Cutscenes are not what's wrong with games, but they are symptomatic of what is. Skillfully employed they can enhance and punctuate the experience; but increasingly the "cinematic" mindset blinds developers to the poverty of the core gameplay.

Not only are we railroaded through "cinematic" linear experiences, but I feel as though we lose abilities and insights we once had. The ability to make fun for ourselves. Far Cry 2 has met severe criticism for "boring" stretches, when in fact the game is one of the strongest recent invitations for gamers to truly play the game as they want to. Creative expression still has a place in the modern shooter.

Multilinear Level Design For Left 4 Dead

Two pages from my sketchbook, as I puzzle out nonlinear level layout possibilities for L4D.

Left 4 Dead is a well polished, mostly traditional FPS experience with a notable innovation: the Director.
Valve designers found that no matter how cleverly zombies were placed, players would quickly begin to anticipate them on repeat playthroughs. So they developed an ingenious system to handle the zombies.

The AI "Director" controls most of the zombie mobs placement and modulate their strength in lieu of traditional designer placement. This makes for wildly variable experiences in terms of enemy encounters, density, and where the Survivors make their defensive stands/when they decide to run.

But on the heels of the L4D SDK's release, my thoughts return to how this governing principle might be more completely extended through the experience--namely the level design.

My own experience of the excellent co-operative L4D experience was that I enjoyed it, but felt not much prompting to replay it because I had experienced the whole "ride".
Despite being a superior specimen thereof, it's still of the linear "funhouse" style FPS experience. I creep around the next corner of an expertly crafted environment, but my friends and I have no say as to where we're headed, which seems contrary to the spirit of a "surviving a zombie apocalypse" game.

Just as the Director unmoors zombie placement from direct designer control, what if the level layout were (to a smaller degree) unpredictable? What if alongside semi-random obstacles and dead-ends, the players had to fight but also actively navigate to freedom?

Arguably this is counter or more complex than Valve might deem desireable or saleable, especially for a game so well designed for perfect casual 30-45 minute play sessions. But for players who have invested enough time in the game and want a more challenging but also more varied experience, I think the idea has merit. Certainly worth further inquiry.

The initial plan is for the player start to be in the dead center of the map, with roughly four main paths radiating outward, like a pinwheel. In addition to these four main trunk lines, there would be interconnecting spokes. This gives players four possible paths with out-bound linear paths, but also lateral movement by way of the spokes.

The "pinwheel" design sketch. The paths are in a roughly square configuration to minimize lateral travel time between main trunk lines. In a finished layout, the actual player-paths would be more s-curved and kinked.

Instead of simply choosing one of four paths--in which multiple playthroughs would very likely expose one to be the easiest path and become preferential to players--there is a degree of chaos introduced by semi-random blockages or dead ends that would appear at various points along these paths and spokes.
This plan is far from a "sandbox" approach, but would ideally allow for complexity by way of multilinearity.

Further updates as I refine and implement a test case with the L4D SDK.


UPDATE: Multilinear layouts are not supported by Left 4 Dead.

Screenshot from test level. It shows that despite the test level having two safe rooms, the escape_route--how the Director and AI reckons player progress through the level--can only route to one of them, not both.

The bright spot here--other than providing a nice way for me to familiarize with L4D's AI/navigational architecture--is that I successfully predicted a design issue with a multilinear path.
Above I wrote that the trouble with multiple routes is that players would likely adapt to one preferential route quickly, without something like semi-randomizing dead-ends or blockages.

After writing the above update I downloaded the SDK and starting working with it. Then I remembered that I hadn't played the L4D commentary mode, and so I played that.
In it, one of the developers (Mike Booth maybe?) mentions trying an early non-linear city block level, and that the trouble was in fact that experienced players quickly found a preferred route (and that bickering about which route to take taxed teamwork).

Now, I don't think this would be as much of a problem if different routes actually provided vastly different endpoints--such as heading north means the suburbs, west means the slums, east meant the industrial outskirts and south meant the forest--but at this stage that's pure conjecture.
L4D is a particular sort of game and a very good one for the design elements chosen. I'll have to wait for another opportunity to experiment with the kind of level structure as outlined above; in the meantime I'm still quite piqued at building a L4D map/campaign.

Level Design Primer: The Sawtooth

Level Design Primer is an introduction to the high level concepts of first person shooter level layout and design.

As to credentials: for two years I built the majority of levels for the forthcoming single player FPS title Darkest of Days. Anything written here is backed by my own experience and observation from building and playtesting.

The sawtooth is such a universal staple of level design that once sensitized to, you will notice them everywhere. It is simple, effective, and (generally) foolproof.


The sawtooth stops the player from going backward. Simple as that. But as with other central design tenets of level design, simple can have far reaching connotations.
It takes innumerable shapes and forms: a broken staircase, a drop-down, a chute, a sheared cliff. Some are obvious, some are seamlessly integrated into the environment in a natural way, some are completely blind--like a ventilation duct that drops out from under you (groan).
Careful modulation of both the obviousness of sawteeth and their frequency are critical to the player's immersion. And the more "realistic" a game purports to be, the more carefully masked and generally less frequent they'll need to be to not be disruptive.

But why impede backward travel in a level? For single player games, there are a number of reasons: it makes life easier for the designer and the for the player in several ways.

The designer no longer has to worry about whatever the player is doing--getting lost, wondering where the party is, getting bored, and eventually quitting (which is the worst thing that can happen for a designer).
They can provide natural break points in the physical layout of the level to complement save points--which save in time, but not necessarily in space. Loading from a save point doesn't mean the player isn't still lost and might wander back to the start of the beginning of the level; a sawtooth means the designer knows for sure.
It's useful in tightly scripted "cinematic" action sequences where if the player otherwise may not know where to go or could veer off course too much and lose the immediacy of the engagement at hand.
Or, if the designer wishes to ambush or really rattle the player, certain kinds of sawtooth elements are useful to prevent the player from simply backing away from the encounter and cherry-picking the enemies from a safe distance.
The designer can also deactivate scripting or delete performance heavy entities or effects that they know for certain the player can no longer see.
This may just sound like its covering for lazy design, and while that does happen it also helps designers concentrate on crafting "the good stuff" rather than an increasing load of invisible-to-the-player housekeeping.

For the player it means a discrete point where, so long as he sees the sawtooth in advance, he knows he must be ready to progress.
For compulsive item and ammunition collecting players, approaching a clear sawtooth is a kindness; certain players hate not knowing if they'll be able to back and scrap up every last round of ammunition before moving forward.
And as previously mentioned, it ratchets physical progression through the level itself, effectively gating the play space into manageable chunks. This is helpful for designers, but aids navigation as well. In traditional "funhouse" like linear layouts, nobody wants to spend time wandering around the dead, empty portions of what they've passed through.

They're not just for single player layouts, either. For multiplayer levels whose flow tends to be circular and concentric, like a heart pumping its warring players into collision, sawtooth elements can still be useful in order to restrict two-way flow into more interesting one-way channels, say around a power-up.

To find examples of a sawtooth element, look no further than the best known FPS franchises with a linear single player or multiplayer component. A short list of recent titles would include Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Killzone 2, Left 4 Dead... you can find examples everywhere, once you look.


The critical view to sawteeth elements and their universal employment would be that they're a crutch that continues to prop up sloppy design and overly linear world design. So long as the kinds of things that make sawteeth such an obvious choice to use are present in level design, we'll continue to get fairly rote, linear "funhouse" type experiences.
But something as monumental as challenging concepts of linearity is outside the purview of this update--more on this sort of thing later.

Level Design Primer: S-Curve Variations

Level Design Primer is an introduction to the high level concepts of first person shooter level layout and design.
As to credentials: for two years I built the majority of levels for the forthcoming single player FPS title Darkest of Days. Anything written here is backed by my own experience and observation from building and playtesting.

Virtually all levels are about basic spatial progression, getting from the start to the finish alive. The job of a level designer is to make that progression as varied, interesting, and worthwhile as you can. Or as I like to think of the work: your job is giving the player an idea and make him think it was his. The better immersed he is in your world, the more he believes it to be his.

With this introductory primer, we'll be looking at some basics of path layout, high-level approaches that keep even a linear path interesting to most players if handled well.



1. The S-Curve
One of the single best guiding design principles for single player level design layout is the s-curve. The s-curve is central because it is the intersection of a variety of desirable qualities: ease of navigation, visual fidelity, interest and surprise. As a guiding high-level concept it will not make a level for you (nothing will), but it will enrich every level that it is incorporated into.

An example scene built in Far Cry 2 on a straight line. While this scene is fairly well composed visually, the path ahead is devoid of surprise. The player can see all three buildings on either side of the street plainly.

Starting out on a straight street or forest path with everything visible from the starting point makes traversing the space a chore; there are no surprises, it is merely ground to be covered.

Take the same path and introduce a slight s-curve. While the direction of travel is still clear, now portions of the path are occluded. Which makes for natural cover placement, enemy placement, or other points of interest. Now introduce vertical variation as well, and there is yet more occlusion as well as potential elements for vertical play. (This helps with the design maxim well understood by Valve that we'll get to later, which is that "players never look up.")

The same scene with a slight s-curve. The left portion of the street now "opens up" to the player, drawing his interest, while at the same time the middle right side of the street is occluded--to find out what's there, he's going to have to go down the street. Two sides of the bridge are now visible, making it more attractive as an endpoint as well. Where the player is standing is also slightly higher than the riverbank at the bridge, introducing more visual interest.

While only a brief sketch, we see how much more "opened up" the very slightly s-curved street layout makes the scene. This works hand in hand with "keeping it wide," another crucial level design maxim.

2. The Kinked Line
Take a soft s-curve and twist it around a bit more and you have what I call a kinked line. Like a garden hose held in hand, it restricts and slows down the flow of play in ways that can provide interesting variations, or opportunity for ambushes and the like. Hold a garden hose too tightly and the water stops completely, but held carefully and the flow can be manipulated. It helps creates more interest points in the path with reversals of direction, even if the overall direction of travel is still forward.

A benefit is that previous or later segments of the line can be made visible to the player, providing visual interest and incentive to continue, as well as helpful visual landmarks.
Kinked lines are quite regularly employed in linear games with real-world settings, since a kinked line or broken grid (see below) progression circumventing "normal" course of travel is accounted for.
The majority of the level paths in Left 4 Dead, for example, can be considered kinked line-style layouts.



3. The Stacked Line
Coil the player path even tighter than a kinked line and you get a stacked line. Like a ropey coil of intestines, the stacked line provides maximal travel time over the smallest area. It is useful for restricting player movement even further, for mood or practical reasons, or maximizing unexpected corners. With environmental density often at a premium, a stacked line can provide a "high value" area for production (though be warned that the player may not share your same estimation of "value.").

Anyone who has been to Disney World has seen stacked lines managed ingeniously--a large room might be used as the foyer to a ride. Yet instead of revealing that the entire room is filled with people waiting for the ride, partitions are introduced, blind corners, stacking the line in a coil which maximizes the room space without alerting any one segment of the line to the rest of it. Done poorly and the patron (or player) will realize what is being done and will be impatient, possibly indignant about the deception. Done well, and the subterfuge is invisible.

Stacked line sequences can be used as a "cool down," puzzle, or other severe restriction on the relative speed of player progression through the world, since the high frequency of 180 degree turns give them a maze-like quality. These must be employed rarely and with great care; perhaps one of the most notable examples of this layout style is the Nova Prospekt sequence in Half-Life 2. A number of levels from that game end up in this category, given that space is more of a premium and the largely corridor-based environments lent themselves well to this style.


4. Broken Grid
A classic level design form is what I call a broken grid, which is simply an interrupted grid with a snaking path or paths through it.

An area is devised along a grid--a city block, a warehouse interior, a colonnade--and then is "broken" so that the grid is only traversible in a modified path, though the grid itself is intelligible. This could be a deathmatch arena, with the breaks simply to provide cover and unique features, or more typically just a form for a single player linear path. The path is still variations on s-curves, but the player appears to be traveling through a grid (though not at all in a gride-like fashion). A broken grid is one of the easiest methods for creating an interesting or potentially multi-path area to progress.

A superlative example of broken grid-style layout on a larger scale would be Silent Hill 2. While the town of Silent Hill itself is shown on the map as a normal grid of streets, the player comes into contact with walls, fences, or gorges that break the grid in challenging ways. While the structure of the town and the basic path seems clear (and visible on the map), the complicating elements provide challenge where there would be little to none otherwise, and are dynamically marked on the map by the player's character.


All these examples may seem simple, but the strength of s-curves applied all throughout the many stages of level design work will eliminate many common problems relating to player confusion or slack time. When the world itself, devoid of items and enemies, is rich and appealing to navigate on its own, you are far less likely to have problems elsewhere.

The Refrigerator Box

In Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, there is a chapter called "The Disembodied Woman" (excerpted here).
In it we read of Christina, a woman who has lost all sense of proprioception. She learns to puppeteer her own body; if she is not looking at a limb, she has no internal sense of what it was doing.


A nightmare scenario for anyone, but one that sounds oddly familiar to gamers.
Proprioception is what we aim to replicate, albeit distantly, when we talk about "body awareness" in games--to look down and see your body is the most basic feedback for a body we cannot sense.
I want to use this as a way to look more generally at the sense of immersion, of being embodied in the avatar, and how FPS games are limited in this respect. Before we talk about any design changes or solutions, we need to understand the problems.

We'll never be able to capture full proprioception (nor would we likely want to), but that same sense of "being there" is critical to immersion. Lack of proprioception is much of the difficulty for new players to grasp FPS controls, given the relative dearth of sensory feedback, and why even experienced players may become injured or killed in the world in a way that seems "unfair."

If FPS players ever feel as though they're a walking refrigerator box in the game instead of a person, it's because they are. Many games refine hit detection for the purpose of assigning damage, but collision-wise most player characters really are just ambulatory refrigerator boxes with a small view slit and a gun, and games are designed to suit.


This box-and-gun model has implications that have shaped and limited FPS games more than we might care to admit. First we'll talk about the player's field of view, then basic collision in the world and scaling issues, and finally a little bit of what this means for the game space and interactivity.

You may recall the furor over "true widescreen" shortly after Bioshock's release. Without getting into that fairly snarled topic of debate, it's worth noting that it was all over a few degrees of field of view. With the standing box-and-gun model for the player in FPS games, the player's field of view (FOV) is a critical window to the world outside the refrigerator box.
In reality we enjoy 140 degrees of binocular vision, where the overlap between the two eyes' vision gives us depth perception, as well as an additional 40 degrees of peripheral FOV.
Stepping inside the refrigerator box gives us monocular (i.e. non-depth perceptive) vision limited to about 90 degrees, and typically far lower, all with no periphery. (A move to third person would expand our practical FOV as well dramatically improve our body awareness, but with other far-ranging costs and implications to the game design, so we'll talk about that later.)
What makes this so troublesome is that maximizing player FOV in order to play the game effectively--situational awareness and target acquisition and so on--can run contrary to other design imperatives.

FOV 75 and FOV 90 on HL2: The Lost Coast. The man appears more distant at 90, even though we are standing face to face. Note that the crowbar remains the same, as it is rendered separately to prevent distortion.

A well known case is that of Half-Life 2. Evolving from the player's fondness for the non-player characters in HL1, Valve spent a great deal of time and effort modeling, animating, and voicing NPCs like Alyx and Barney, characters that would make up the emotional core of the experience.
They quickly found that their wide-angle FOV, ideal for fighting enemies in the world, made these friendly characters appear farther away then they would have liked, even when standing face to face (or face to box). HL2 shipped with a standard FOV set to 75 degrees instead of 90, with a special case that opened it up to 85 degrees during vehicle driving sequences.
Bethesda Softworks would take a different approach to the same problem for The Elder Scrolls IV:Oblivion and then later Fallout 3. They retained a higher, more "distancing" FOV, and chose to dynamically zoom in on any NPC in the world that the player talks to to simulate the desired visual intimacy.

In addition to the relative perceptual difficulties related to FOV and characters in the world, higher FOVs introduce distortion, given from projecting a spherical perspective onto a flat screen. While this can be cleverly incorporated into the game, as with playing the alien perspective Aliens Vs. Predator with a very high "fisheye" type FOV, it's a problem for weapons in first person.
And when you're a refrigerator box with a hole cut out, the gun you hold in your hands is a central visual hallmark, your primary (and often only) agency in the world.
At higher FOVs, the gun in hand begins to distort along with the world, its apparent distance from you potentially more disconcerting than the apparent distance to NPCs. That the gun is often rendered separately from the world may ameliorate this, but alienate the player in other ways, furthering his or her apparent separation from the world. They're already a firm proprioceptive barrier away from the game already; any additional layers between the player and the world become prohibitive.
But this is enough to sketch out the myriad of issues associated with the first person perspective and FOV; I'd like to talk about the box out in the gameworld.

People understand that their avatar is clumsier than themselves, and that with practice a player is able to overcome or compensate for most shortcomings. This means they're nominally past thinking about the refrigerator box, but the box is always there. Often we can feel it, more often if the gameworld has not been scrupulously designed to accomodate the problem.
What I mean is that with level design there's a tricky balance between visual scale and player scale. The immersed player forgets that he is a refrigerator box, yet the world still need be scaled to accomodate his generous girth.

A friend of mine and fellow level designer Drew Risch taught me the simple, fundamental rule for good playspace in an FPS: keep it wide.
It's relatively simple to establish scale for all buildings, objects, and characters in a game to correspond with reality, but real world scale is unbearable for a refrigerator box to negotiate, even if the box itself is the relative dimensions of a person. You're a box, a box with only a small hole out the front with which to engage the world, so allowances must be made. Despite being a box you must be made to feel the hero, and heroes don't have to carefully negotiate kitchen furniture like the morbidly obese.
To that end the gameworld must be carefully widened, ballooned to allow the passage of this refrigerator box player and his often as-clumsy-if-not-clumsier AI compatriots.
The trick is to make this work mechanically, while still visually keeping the world in the ballpark of reality. It won't match, not if the world is truly wide enough for the player to move around comfortably, but these discrepancies can be carefully masked. In HL2, the corners of the Gordon-box can get the player stuck neatly into right angles of tight spaces such as elevators--level designers place invisible wedges in corners to prevent exactly this.
(In third person these sorts of issues are even more pronounced, though in different form; replay the beginning of Max Payne 2 and observe a world necessarily warped to accomodate Max's bullet-dodging antics and follow camera.)


We begin to see clearly why information systems, usually delivered via some sort of heads-up display (HUD) become so critical to helping the player over such considerable handicaps. The player has a narrow FOV and no proprioception, so environmental cues of sight and sound (plus a little rumble, if on a console) are all he or she is going to get.
Detailed sound design with corresponding sensitization of the player that these sound cues mean something (like the dry snapping sound of a bullet passing close by) can help close to gap left by so many missing senses, but won't fix everything. Which is why damage indicators and the like are now considered standard, as there is simply too much critical feedback the player needs to survive.

But I feel as though we've opened many doors without much sense to how we might approach a solution or a change from the problems these issues present.
At this point, what I want to impress upon you is that the player character is a refrigerator box with a hole cut in it and a gun sticking out, and so long as he remains such--a mute, verb-poor box, murdering everything in his path only to pause occasionally to flail at an oversized green-lit button or watch a mandatory cutscene--FPS games will likely remain the dim spectacle that they've been for years. There certainly is hope, but there's also a lot of dead weight carried from sequel to sequel that ought to be reconsidered.
But I'm getting ahead of myself and betraying more ambition than I care to for a first entry.

Next time, we'll talk about methods to overcome these seemingly crippling limitations, and explore other design issues present with the status quo.


Summary of embedded links:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat on Amazon.com
Excerpt from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, "The Disembodied Lady."
Wikipedia entry for Proprioception
Wikipedia entry for field of view
Valve Developer Wiki on FOV in HL2
Excerpt of Max Payne 2 playthrough on youtube