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.

Design Reboot: Clive Barker's Jericho

Note: To clear up a common confusion to newcomers to the site: I did not work on Clive Barker's Jericho; this is the hypothetical/speculative work of an outsider to the game's production, as are most all of my posts.
 


Arcade Fire - My Body Is A Cage

Jericho was good enough to get itself into trouble. Most people seem not to take issue with unremarkably bad or uninspired games, but games with enough good ideas to spark a wistfulness for what could have can be upsetting. Glancing blows with greatness--really, it's these sorts of games that inspired this site.

We might not care about Jericho, had Clive Barker (an admitted non-gamer) not first lent his ideas and name to Undying, a horror FPS that found a cult audience following initially poor reception. Jericho may share some elements of the game's atmosphere, but the inspired mechanical depth of that title is unfortunately lacking with Jericho.

Peruse the rather over-detailed wikipedia summary for a plot synopsis: Jericho is about a supernatural SWAT-team of seven characters out to re-trap God' first creation, the Firstborn, in a sort of time-anomalous ruin in the middle east called Al Khalil. In order to do this, they travel back through dimensional pockets back through time.

To say the game doesn't live up to it's potential is facile to the point of meaninglessness, despite how oft-repeated the criticism is of games it's applicable to all but the most perfectly scoped and executed titles; rather we will point out the major issues, and more importantly the kernels of good ideas and expand upon them.

Problems

Jericho's largest faults lay with the dearth of challenge in uniquely videogame terms. Yes, some of the fights are difficult, but all puzzles are solved for you (anything blocking your passage will prompt you immediately which team member is needed to clear it), and logistically the game is lacking any depth with the employment of both regenerating health and regenerating ammo.

There are absolutely no items, power-ups, or collectibles to be found in the environment and very little to interact with. This makes the straightjacket-linear levels, convincingly rendered as some of them are, completely dead to the player; much player involvement is lost when there is no need to investigate surroundings.

Level layout typical of the original Jericho. Linear, with nothing to collect.

There were bright spots however--the early game twist of your stalwart, generic white male hero player character getting killed and becoming a ghost is one of them.
From that point you can possess the remaining team members at will, imbuing them with the character's own healing powers.
There is one other character (Father Rawlings) capable of resurrecting characters so there is a reasonable depth to battles where you must ensure that the squad stays alive by way of resurrecting fallen teammates. With no one left alive you lose and must restart to the last checkpoint.

Resolutions

This gameplay concept is what's worth expanding on, with the attendant hooks in the world fiction. The most obvious problem solving would be to re-activate the world in terms of interest. The player and his squad need to be able to look for supplies and feel rewarded for it; the player also could use level layouts that actually provide some tactical depth.
Longer engagement distances (allowing the player to set up and use Black, the sniper character, effectively), and more varied enemy attack patterns other than straight forward suicide charges or stand-and-fire would also be important additions.

Proposed level layout style: multiple approaches, some which require certain squad mates to still be alive to access, items/collectibles, differing engagement distances.

As covered in the redesign of the game's characters, I think an essential element of a horror atmosphere is the vulnerability, humanity of the team themselves; introducing ways in which they might deteriorate in a decidedly un-videogame-like fashion could be very interesting.

There was an Apple II game, the name is lost to me, that involved rescuing hostages. There was a "practice" and a "for keeps" mode--if you played in the latter and lost a hostage, that hostage's profile was deleted permanently off the 5¼-inch floppy disk.

I thought about this in combination with an element from Hitman: Contracts. In that game, there is a collectible weapon in plain view behind a locked door, the key to which is only acquired in the second to last level. The player needs to get the keycard and then re-play the first mission to get the gun, which like any of the collectible weapons, can then be used in any other mission.
This may just be an aspect of the game's fiction setting up most of the missions as being replayed in 47's memory, but I don't think the framing device is necessary; these sorts of things keep to game-logic, and that is enough. It is unique to the medium and therefore should be used freely, as it is something that is ours alone.

Where I'm going with this is a change to the core mechanics of Jericho that would follow, in terms of achronological game logic: we'll say that characters can be resurrected, as they could be in the original game, but with a price.
There is some toll extracted, shuttling to and from the mortal coil such that after a certain number, teammates will become listless and withdrawn, though their combat effectiveness stays roughly the same. I am thinking of the slow graying, darkening of Wander, the player character in Shadow of the Colossus.

The "death counter" increments regardless of save state, the only way to reset it is to start a new game. This means that together with some more conventional restorations to the gameplay--more interesting levels, item collection, non-regenerative healing/ammunition--the game takes on longer-term ramifications. After say ~20 or so deaths (the threshold number would change based on chosen difficulty), a team member is no longer themselves, a short of walking shadow of their previous selves--so you have the option of leaving them to die permanently. Final team makeup and their death counters figure prominently into what kind of ending you receive, but also the choices the player makes in the narrative.

The idea being that as you progress in the game, there are real cost/benefits to how you fight the battles, who you use or push harder. You can rez your teammembers indefinitely if you don't care about them as characters, but at the end of the game you end up with a set of shadow-men, ghostly revenants. There might be inherent conflicts of interest--unlike the original game we'll say that the Priest and the guy with the fire demon possessing his arm don't exactly get along.

You might let a few of the squad members take more hits than others, and sacrifice them later in order to smooth out team dynamics--say I don't care for Church's ninja-style abilities or how she bickers with Black, so I use her as cannon fodder until late in the game at which point I let her die.
Like the original game, there would be roadblocks that would require a specific teammember's abilities to pass--but they would either be alternate paths/shortcuts/access to secret caches instead
A sketch of ending patterns as follows, many of them can be achieved simultaneously:

• Shadow King: all teammates revenants (50+ deaths) at end
• Alive Alone: all teammates dead save one at end
• The Vocation: Father Rawlings (not player) handles all rezzing; no revenants at end
  
• Rude Mechanicals: only Delgado, Black, Cole alive at end
• Get Behind Me: Delgado survives fire demon exorcism
• Preservation Society: End playthrough with all original squad weapons intact
• The Loss of Ross: game ends with team leader's ghost lost forever
  
• Sun King: No revenants, all teammates survive end
• The Story is the Same: team agrees to sacrifice themselves containing Firstborn
  
• The Story Changes: team defeats Firstborn

My only nagging concerns with this concept is that they fall into the same traps of other titles with multiple endings, being that one ending above all others is considered the "best" ending, whereas others are "bad" or less preferable. I'm more interested in games with narratives centered on player actions, holding a mirror to how the player makes sense of the world and their choices, rather than stale, one-dimensional moralizing or cheap counterfeits of storytelling in other media.
What, dear readers, do you think are ways to resolve this issue?

Visual Clarity in Character Design (Part II)

In Part II we'll consider the key characteristics discussed in the first entry--silhouette/scale, color/patterns, and materials/detailing, and see if we can't make an existing set of less than optimal characters "read" more clearly in gameplay situations.

The very gothic Jericho Team.

For candidates, I looked no further than a game I had finished playing just recently: Clive Barker's Jericho.
It was not well received and mostly for good reason, but there are some inspired concepts running through it. It's ideal for our purposes because you control a larger than average team of six characters, and it's tactical enough that identifying characters different squad members at a glance makes a difference.

Hanne Lichthammer, an undead Nazi boss character in the game, seen out-gothing the Jericho team by a wide margin.

Trouble is, the game revolves around a decidedly goth-leaning, melanin-challenged (even the black man of the team is ghostly pale) supernatural special ops team with a fondness for shades of black.
With the exceptions of Delgado (the big chain-gunning fellow) and Church (the small-framed ninja), this is a large group of friendly characters that are difficult to tell apart in combat and/or low light levels--both of which recur regularly, often together.
Here's a collected image of the original characters and their names, so you know who I'm referring to for the rest of the article:


Where to begin? Many of the problems with the team extend further than just visual appearance and into their broad, even offensively stereotypical characterizations.
Delgado is the sass-talkin' latino, Father Rawlings is the deep fried southern preacher-type, Black is the militant lesbian sniper, etc.
(I think the game interesting enough that the follow-up to this entry will be a full-fledged design sketch.)

For now we'll stick to their appearances: in keeping with the gothic, spooky ambience befitting a Clive Barker game, the entire team is pale and black clad. This ends up as a significant issue in two ways.

The call is coming from inside the crypt.

First off, from the point of view of player investment and interest, these six characters are a hard sell--they walk into this hellish landscape overpowered with magic and arms, imminently well-qualified to deal with the problem, and the game mechanics as well as fiction hold that the team can both resurrect members and resupply them with ammunition indefinitely--so why do they need my help at all?
What's horrifying about these gothic sulks having to deal with the end of the world, aren't all their own apartments furnished in the same style as the oozing rivers of blood and hellscape they now traverse? In other words, the team seems to be lacking dramatic contrast to their environment. Far from being put out and suggesting fear and terror as appropriate responses, they seem at home.

Second, even if I did feel invested in the obnoxious stereotypes, I often have trouble seeing them at all, certainly in telling them apart at a glance. A few of them are attired in shiny black catsuit-type material, which improves their visibility somewhat in low light conditions, but not enough to be helpful. Most of the characters are designed with a kind of runic filigree covering their suits, presumably as a replacement for lack of shape or form differentiation, but it's none too successful.

At left is a sample palette of the game's environments, derived from pixelated averages of a few representative screenshots.
The game is heavily atmospheric--fog, smoke, fire predominate to good effect. Mounds of sloughed off rotting flesh and rivers of blood show up as with any self-respecting time-fragmented hellscape, so the general palette of the game tends to run to warm, flesh and earth tones, and generally very dark.
While thankfully the Jericho squad isn't wearing blood-red catsuits, which really would make for unfortunate camoflage, the black suits don't really help visibility, especially for the extended sequences shrouded in darkness (perfectly appropriate for a horror game).

So as we begin, we'll identify the specific issues we wish to solve: shape/silhouette differentiation (for when color information is not present), visibility of material and detailing in warm colored and low light situations, and finally player sympathy/horror game appropriateness of the character designs.

First things

The temptation for me as an artist is to get to drawing and painting characters immediately, but this isn't actually that helpful when I could end up with a lot of wasted time for a redesign of such a large team of characters. So we'll stick with a consciously simplified approach--not only does it keep artists from pouring too much effort into a design before it's well considered, but it's simple enough that little or no drawing ability won't stop someone from using the same process.
We begin with a simple diagrammatic layout of the team divided into their control squads, Alpha and Omega.


Like the L4D color comparison in the first entry, I'm using simplified representations for the characters in order so I do not distract myself with painting and rendering too early.
A well drawn character can mask design flaws that don't manifest themselves until it's too late--the model and texture are done running around in the game. Revisions at that point are extraordinarily expensive in money and man-hours; far better to squash as many problems before they ever happen when revisions are as cheap as the point of an eraser, the point of a pencil.

Scale

So now we've got three men, three women in simple outlines. The scale relationships of the team originally are a good starting point, so we'll stay fairly consistent to the original team designs.

Cole is the "medium" female, Jones the "medium" male, Delgado the largest of all characters, Black the tallest of the females. We'll make Rawlings a narrow, vertical form, while Church is the diminutive ninja form. Like so:


If it seems simple, that's because it is, but take the time, foundations are critical.
It's also instructive to do this kind of designing with all characters visible on a sheet--small as it is, this workflow reinforces the necessity of cross-checking all the character designs against each other as much as possible.

Silhouette


The biggest change here is giving Black a sort of Ghillie suit/dress, instead of the black catsuit that appears in the game (and makes her look very similar to Cole). Otherwise, most of what I'm paying attention to here is a simple factor of how much skin is visible. Something tells me tacti-shorts are right out when rethinking a supernatural tactical response team, so I'm mostly looking at collar cuts and sleeve lengths.
Though it's not pronounced at this stage, I'm already thinking of exaggerating Cole's augmented reality visor's scale in order to giver her more of a Daft Punk head silhouette (added bonus of hugely reflective helmet), whereas Jones gets a high, protective collar, almost like a bomb technician. Rawling's duster/great coat remains largely unchanged.
(There's evidence the development team ran into these issues, as the concept art for Church doesn't have the large suit cut-out panels. Either they realized the difficulty of recognizing the characters in the dark or needed some sex appeal--or both.)

Patterns and Colors


Knowing that most of the game's environments are in ruddy/earth tones, I swung to the complementary color on the wheel: green. Olive drab, more specifically. I considered this in tandem with my problem with the game fiction and player identification issue: even if there are potentially world-ending supernatural threats out there, I have a hard time believing that the government would actually give decent funding for their super secret "Department of Occult Warfare" were it to exist.

This gave rise to the thought of a second-rate secret force, a kind of discount BPRD: what if the team didn't get all the latest gear and an unmarked Blackhawk helicopter to deliver them to jobs? Still saving the world, but without commensurately magical budgets, because who would honestly believe them, anyway?
Certainly would help make the team less invincible-seeming, more personable, and helps free me from having to straightjacket all of the characters into the same vaguely high tech gothsuits.

I'll explore these concepts later, but for now it means that the characters end up more irregular military-looking, rather than pale and black everything. The black character in the group gets to actually be black, a small kindness.

I've also given the different squads identifying armbands with associated colors. Here again is some surprising vestiges of discarded decisions from the original team: if you look closely at the set of six original character designs, you'll notice that only the Omega squad (bottom row) have red armbands.
Looking at the original Mercury Steam concept art for Delgado (above and right), you can see a blue armband. I can only infer at some point, Alpha squad had blue armbands to go with Omega's red armbands, but in the continuing quest for true gothification, these were discarded, with the assumption that you only needed armbands for one of the teams, making the other team distinct by nature of having no armbands.

The fact that it took partway through writing this very article to discover that Omega squad only had the red armbands should be proof enough that this is less than successful. I can only think that the earlier thought of red and blue-coded squad armbands was the better choice, and in my redesign it is one I have reinstated.

Summary


Here's an animated .gif of the above stages, showing that it doesn't take a lot of time or even drawing ability to take a large group of characters and make them distinct from each other. And if you are an artist, it's a smart step to take before you launch into fully-detailed sketches. Time is money, or rather time is what you're wasting toward the end of the day when the art director comes over, sees what you've drawn, and asks for a complete revision.

Finally, the completed concepts, with accompanying revision notes (reference the laughably game guide-esque Wikipedia entry character bios for comparison, before they get scrubbed):

Cole

I made sure to exaggerate her defining feature, her helmet. Otherwise, her stance is the other major defining feature of her silhouette.
Instead of the nervy rookie presentation, Cole's bulbous augmented reality helmet (retrofitted 60's astronaut equipment as it happens) keeps her at a quiet remove from the rest of the team. Her modified FAMAS rifle scope feeds into the helmet HUD; it's 5.56 rounds are shared in common with Delgado.
Poise: shoulders back--professional and assured, high rifle carry.

Jones

Jones is reconfigured as a player surrogate, the most "normal" character for a shooter player; gear trappings like that of a modern soldier or PMC.
Though still a telepath, he treats his power with a matter of fact sensibility (reminiscent of Miles on Lost). He carries an old school M14, which can share rounds with Black's sniper rifle.
Poise: hunched combat glide of a trained, experienced modern soldier.

Delgado

Delgado is still the heavy weapons man, but stripped of both the distractingly overt power armor and stereotypical mannerisms. While the onyx sheath on his right arm was interesting, his former man-portable minigun was distracting and over-powered. The whole get-up distracted from his humanity, any sense that he might actually be vulnerable to attack.
Delgado pulls the glove off his right hand to unleash his pet fire spirit. He carries a vintage Stoner 63 machine gun.
Poise: casual swagger, nerves of steel.

Black

Black retains the coarse manner, but ideally without the ill-timed and obnoxious barks. She's unhappy that she couldn't plan ahead with a hell-colored Ghillie suit--though even in the infernal backdrops of Al-Khalil, once her Ghillie suit is zipped up and hooded she makes for a hard target. She sports a bolt-action CZ 700 sniper rifle, which means she can share .308 ammunition with Jones, but he's not likely to get any of long-distance-balanced handloads short of begging.
Poise: crouching, furtive gait of a sniper out of position.

Rawlings

Father Rawlings is redesigned as a non-combatant--as glorious and hideous as his double deagling was before, it makes more sense with his priestly vows and deepens tactical considerations that the healer/resurrector of the group cannot directly defend himself.
He's considerably moodier and sardonic, less drawling southern; the missions of Team Jericho have initiated a long "dark night of the soul" for the priest.
Poise: hunched and glowering.

Church

Church is still the ninja of the group but with a more elegant strain to her bearing. As a blood scribe, she wears a mysterious tattoo covering much of her back. She carries the coffin-magazined Italian Spectre M4 submachine gun, in addition to her katana.
Poise: strictly ninja.


As the modified dossiers suggest, another update will feature a wider critique of Jericho and a matching illustrated design sketch.
I feel as though I haven't explained my re-design choices all that well in terms of justifying their enhanced visual clarity, but this entry is getting quite a bit too long already--what say you?

Visual Clarity in Character Design (Part I)

With the release of Left 4 Dead 2 coming up, let's talk about visual clarity in character design. Valve has learned quite a bit about doing it right in recent years, so it's worth dissecting a few of the lessons they've learned.

We'll start with some background, and then cover three main concerns: silhouette/scale, color/patterns, and materials/detailing. In another update, we'll apply these lessons to less than successful character designs in another existing game and see what we come up with.

The L4D Survivors before and after major reworking, after Turtle Rock Studios' absorption into Valve proper.

Valve's visual bravura arguably dates to Half-Life 2. But HL2 was more of a breakthrough in terms of memorably drawn characters, rather than a variety of pragmatic concerns we'll be discussing here--a single player game with invincible/high health friendly NPCs is not the same as designing for team/co-op multiplayer.
By pragmatic, I mean the kinds of things that have a direct impact on gameplay. For this, we'll look at Team Fortress 2.

Players may remember that TF2 was originally--circa 1998 or so--going for a more realistic visual and gameplay style (seen at left).

Thankfully while in development, in they were soundly swooped by a number of different games, most notably the Battlefield series of games.

TF2 was ultimately redesigned closer to the original Quake mod roots of the game, but with a clean, stylized look harkening to the work of classic 20th century commercial illustrators.


We see the particular stamp of Moby Francke's visual style, which from an outsider's perspective seems to be the strongest artistic voice on where TF2 would end up, visually. (I have no doubt this greater movement toward visual clarity in character designs was due to others artists as well, but Francke's work seems the single best artist at the company I can point to.)
Prior to his work on TF2, witness his Counter-Strike: Source model sheets (below and to the right).

While the character designs had already been more or less decided with the mod version of Counter-Strike, notice the presentation of the model sheet itself. Major shapes and silhouettes are emphasized over detailing or texture.

This is a crucial concept governing much of the successfulness of TF2: a clean, uncluttered, "readable" look. The CS:S models are not hugely different from the original CS characters, but they are an iterative improvement and a step toward what would become TF2.

Below, one of Moby Francke's character designs for TF2. Same presentation for the model sheets as for CS:S, but with the style of the game he's able to work in more memorable silhouettes. Simply by considering the various TF2 characters with relation to each other you can reverse-engineer most of these lessons--but let's talk about them more in detail.



Silhouette/Scale

Even some of the most casual players are probably aware of silhouette design issues. This is perhaps the single most important factor when designing any videogame character. Look below--do you have trouble identifying any of the characters below solely by their silhouettes?
With TF2, Valve realized that the more quickly the player needs to identify other characters and act on that information (friend or foe, what class the other player is) the more important it becomes. The demands of a hardcore, team-based competitive multiplayer game helped drive the visual style for TF2 to not only be attractive, but also transparent to the needs of the gameplay. This transparency would be honed and show up again with L4D 1 and 2.



Character designs can be placed on a spectrum from the naturalistic (L4D) to stylized, to the almost completely abstract (say, Space Invaders). Above, these characters are all nominally human, but their silhouettes vary wildly. The more stylized the game, generally the more wiggle room you'll have to play with in terms of defining through silhouette.

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics has a very useful lens to consider this concept--the "Pictorial Vocabulary"--that applies equally as well to videogames as it does to comics. (A more detailed version with examples of this is available here.)


As games become more abstracted either up or to the right of this triangle, the more dramatic the differences in silhouette (may) become. Game mechanics tend to track similarly, though it is not strictly correlated. (There are a lot of games with somewhat realistic graphics but highly abstract mechanics and world.)
Start with a normal human silhouette, think about the various different messages it sends--height, weight, gender, age; the interrelations of shapes (held weapons also count a lot for unique silhouette), the character's most common postures, style of animation, etc. Silhouette is one of the most identifying factors so long as the character in question is not significantly occluded visually, or they can be clearly discerned from the background.


It's worth noting that for L4D, silhouette will also communicate important information like being gravely wounded--once a player has very low health they transition to the stooped, wounded stagger in place of a normal gait.

The natural corollary to silhouette is scale. A silhouette may identify a character well, but introduced together with scale variation, a character's readability is boosted considerably. With L4D, all characters are realistically scaled/silhouetted human characters (no giants, no dwarves, and no spikey anime hair) and yet the characters are all well differentiated on these grounds.


Color/Patterns

This is one of the least appreciated aspects of good visual character design. Clear, simplified application of color and pattern can be one of the best ways to create well differentiated characters--and it is here that arguably the L4D character designs are strongest.


Let's look at character concepts for both L4D1 and L4D2. Then consider the color schemes, divorced from all other aspects besides color by applying them to the same Lego minifigure-like template. Players familiar with them will have no trouble naming all 8 characters:


Simple, strong combinations of colors in different arrangements can by themselves create memorable, easily differentiated characters that can be IDed by the player under duress reliably, which is the holy grail for functional character design.



Materials/Detailing

Out of all concerns, materials and detailing are some of the most difficult to explicate, but still crucial to overall presentation. Material choice--say, a glistening bright shine on armor or a weapon vs. a matte finish--can go a long way, especially when other information isn't available to the player.
Extremely low-light conditions will strip players of color information, leaving only silhouette cues and in many cases not even that. Extremely reflective materials, on the other hand, will still "read" differently than matte ones in low light. (Which is part of why most real-world military firearms feature some manner of matte finishing, parkerizing and the like--so they won't reflect sharply in the dark.)

The associated problems here are why we've got the single biggest crutch for videogame character design: glow-y bits. Everyone from Sam Fisher to Marcus Fenix can orient themselves easily in a pitch-dark room, thanks to gratuitous glow-y bits. Your future power armor design lacking that necessary punch, or clarity? Glowing tech-bits are every lazy s.f. concept artist's best friend.

The slippery slope.

Detailing is a sort of catch-all description for other concerns too numerous for the scope of this article, including the overall visual complexity of a character. As such it should be considered carefully, as should the overall visual complexity of your game, as it relates to your gameplay.
Marcus Fenix and the other COGs in Gears of War are deceptive cases: with careful deployment of certain techniques, in combination with more overt ones such as glow-y bits, you can still maintain fairly good legibility--even if tastefulness remains elusive.

Color-overlay shaders reveal a breakdown of basic visual clarity in UT3.

But it can be tricky--Gears of Wars' near sibling Unreal Tournament 3, despite a very similar aesthetic, fails almost completely in terms of clarity of visual design. Busy, techy character designs against busy, techy backgrounds mean that in team games, characters and vehicles (!) at mid-to-long distances are overlayed with a red or blue shader shell, in order that they're readily perceptible at all.

I apologize if some of these concepts aren't fully explained, but with Part II we'll be applying all the lessons to some existing designs in another game. In the meantime--what are your favorite examples of visually successful and spectacularly unsuccessful visual designs for videogame characters?

Further viewing: Illustrative Rendering in TF2 Presentation

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).]