Reverse Level Design 2

Like I mentioned in my previous blog, I set myself a warm up project to map out level designs of games already on the market so I could analyse the flow and what parts of the level are easy to communicate and which are difficult. The games I went with are, God of War 3, Left 4 Dead and Oddworld Abe’s Odyssey.

I tried to pick games both different in genre and game style, God of War is adventure/action heavily combat orientated with some puzzles and exploration to break up the action set pieces. One of the things God of War has always been good at is keeping the battles varied and interesting through changing environment obstacles, enemy patterns/routines or simply because the game is great to look at graphically. Some parts of the level were more difficult to map than others, mainly when a puzzle was involved. The puzzle room towards the top of the map became very difficult to explain and show due to the complex nature of the puzzle. 

God of War is renown for it's bloody combat and large scale environments. Battles are often broken up with puzzles revolving around switches and box pushing.

Left 4 Dead I chose because I wanted a first person perspective game and developer Valve are renown FPS game designers so it seemed like a good candidate. Also, I thought it would be interesting as this game is heavily dependent on its co-op nature and the level designs must take into account 4 players will always be present in the game. This game was relevantly easy to map. Unlike the other two games L4D doesn't have many environment interactions or puzzles and is based sorely on the survival combat between the players.

Finally, I chose Oddworld most importantly because it’s 2D and therefore would be designed and communicated in a completely different way to the other two games. From all three of the maps this one is probably the easiest one to communicate. It's also probably the most accurate one for an artist or programmer to pick up as it clearly shows the exact positions of the obstacles whereas the maps for the 3D maps are a bit vague to the specifics and more a 'general design' for the level.

Oddworld is broken up screen by screen, presenting different challenges in each one. 

Less blog, more work

Right now, I still haven’t nailed down exactly what I want to get from Semester 1. I want my work this year to be appropriate to show employers in a portfolio once I’ve finished my M.A. It would make sense to play on my strengths of mechanics and concepts but it’s becoming more and more obvious that employers are only interested in people with diverse skill set, so I really want to expand my skills in the next year. I’ve considered going back to the dreaded Maya because I think it would help alot in the long run to have that added to my skills. I just wish I had made more effort getting to grips with it in the second and third year of my B.A.

After a discussion on Friday with the M.A course leader and some other M.A students, I’ve sort of got a handle on the direction I want to take. I’m really keen to explore relationships between mechanics and level design. As of yet I’m not sure whether it’s a better idea to create my own mechanics to show off what I can do with my own creations or take the limitations of already existing mechanics and show off what I can do with them. For a while I’ve thought it would be an interesting idea to design levels for existing titles to work within their constraints but I don’t want my M.A. to come up as some ‘fan art/fiction’ instead of something professional that’s going to really impress people when they see it.

I’ve thought I could maybe do a combination, create my own levels and mechanics for my own unique games, taking existing mechanics into a new game and maybe designing levels for an existing game with a new mechanic. I’d like to have as much creative control as I can over my projects because I know, when/if I do get a job in the industry I’ll have little to no real creative control over the titles I work under.

Some games with interesting mechanics/themes;

Dark Cloud/Chronicle – The player collects resources in dungeons to rebuild the villages/towns in the world. NPC can be moved into houses, but some often have requires e.g (one person might want to live next to a river). As part of the story the player must travel into the future versions of their to advance the story.

Majora’s Mask – The player must collect and use a variety of masks to gain different abilities and even transform into different species.

Oddworld – The player can possess enemies and take control of all their actions. The player can also speak with other NPC’s using ‘gamespeak’ shouting introductions to other characters to escape.

Okami – The player controls of a wolf with the abilities to use the ‘Celestial Brush’ to paint stars in the sky, change from night to day, make flowers/trees bloom, slash enemies, draw broken bridges and much more.

Portal – Using a portal gun, the player can create portal entrances and exit points to solve puzzles.

Ape Escape – Using a large net and variety of tools, the objective of each stage to catch a certain number of escaped monkeys.

Shadow of the Colossus – Traversing large open fields, the player must hunt down and kill 16 Colossi, massive, boss like creatures which the player must climb to stab its weak points.

Wind Waker  - Sailing large open world on the sea, taking control of the wind directions to solve puzzles and sail.

Reverse Level Design 1

My main goals this year are to develop my communication skills as a level/game designer. I feel confident enough in my abilities to create game concepts and mechanics so this year will be about developing my skills to make those concepts and mechanics actually mean something. Research seems pretty limited in terms of actual level designing; there are few books available to me and even fewer examples of professional industry work. At the moment it seems like I’m going to have to do everything by myself.

The books I have been reading are based more around design philosophies and how to evocate a reaction in the player. They provide great information and advice in general games design experience but again, little to nothing in terms of actually describing the best way to communicate level concept/designs to other people.

When actually playing a game everything is tightly bound together, the sound, art direction, the design and programming all mesh together to create a virtual world in which the player steps into. Trying to look at one of these separately can be tricky with all the other distractions around them.  I was lucky enough to come across The Art of Halo: Creating a Virtual World, which had some of Bungie’s very earlier level design sketches. It’s great to see the first stages of creation, when something went from nothing to something.

Taken from The Art of Halo, Original sketch concepts of levels from Bungie's Halo series.

This inspired a good warm up exercise related to my M.A project, instead of creating a concept on paper with the intention of it being developed into a real game I would do the opposite. I would take an existing game and take it back to the development stages. There are a few reasons for this. First, it will allow me to see that even the most visually impressive game, look exactly the same on paper as a cheap one. Second, it will allow me to see ‘the flow’ of level more clearly, how they are broken up into different gameplay sections. And thirdly, it will let me see which areas of the level are difficult to communicate through visuals.  Hopefully I’ll have the results posted on here soon.

Screw the rules I have money!

If you boil it down to the core, video games involve nothing more than holding a cheap piece of plastic, hitting buttons and watching shapes on your TV react. Even the most artistic, breathtaking, expensive games boil down to the same principles. The actions on screen only become a game when they are given context and context in video games is all about rules. So by definition there is nothing that separates indie or retail games other than their budgets and production values. They are both a collection of rules the player must abide by.

From my experience all games have two types on rules, generic or game specific. Generic rules are the rules that we don’t even think about. For example, in the majority of games the player and the game world abide by the laws of gravity. The player sticks to the ground and falls if they step off a ledge. These are rules that go without saying, the rules that we live by in our real everyday life.  Occasionally a game may change generic rules for the sake of gameplay but generally speaking they are rules commonly found in all games.

Game specific rules are the rules which make up the game itself; these rules are the constraints put on the player and the rules on how beat or lose the game. The game mechanics are the tools for the player to operate within these rules. Take any FPS for example, the rules of the game state if you are shot by an enemy a certain amount of times you will die. The weapons and abilities for you to defend yourself with are the mechanics.

Good game design should be efficient, making the most of the limitations and tools the designers have to work with. Efficient game design is using few game mechanics and using those mechanics in surprising ways, coming up with bizarre obstacles that use the mechanics in more than one way. Take for example, some classic multiplayer FPS’ (I’ll use Halo Reach as my example as I’ve played that recently).

The rules/mechanics are pretty straight forward, you point gun at bad guy and press button till it dies and the enemy does the same to you. You can pick up certain items/weapons, you can jump and crouch. These are the mechanics of the game; in most FPS’s there are different rules for different game types. Capture the flag adds no new mechanics to the game but instead changes the rules of play entirely. The game is no longer about killing for points but instead stealing and escaping. Similarly Halo Reach’s ‘Infection’ mode is another great example of this. The rules of the game split the players into Infected or Regular players. The infected players are forced to use the Sword weapon only capable of killing the regular players up close. Once killed by an infected player regular players become infected. No mechanics are added to Halo Reach for these game modes. Instead it is a simple adjustment of the game rules to make the game almost, entirely new.

Oddball, Infection and Capture the Flag are just a few of the game modes in Halo Reach.

There are some great games which bend the rules of their world, fully utilizing all the game’s resources and mechanics. It might just be a personal preference but these are often the sort of games that impress me the most, there’s nothing less fun then having the same dreary challenge again and again for 8 hours till the credits roll.

I recently purchased Limbo, from Playdead Studios an indie game studio based in Denmark. Limbo is a great example of coming up with creative obstacles in an otherwise restricted game. The game has a surprisingly small amount of inputs, the player can move left or right, they can jump and they can grab objects. That’s it. Despite this the game rarely ever slacks, it consistently throws unique and clever traps at you without having to add any extra moves. For indie developers this seems like the  most efficient way to design a good game. Other indie games which use minimal game mechanics in place of sophisticated obstacles and level designs are Splosion Man, Critter Crunch and Angry Birds.

Giant spiders, serious business.

This isn’t to say that games with plenty of mechanics aren’t good, they are very different types of games. Metal Gear Solid 4 has heaps of gadgets, weapons and mechanics so much in fact I didn’t even discover some on the moves until my second or third playthrough. MGS4 was great in alot of ways because it allowed the player to play the how THEY wanted, the players was given an objective, some tools to complete those objectives and that was it. It’s admirable in alot of ways as this much freedom gives the player a sense of accomplishment when they beat the game in their own way. 

Having said that, sometimes too many mechanics can make the game feel like a mess. With MGS4 it was warranted due to the ambiguity of the gameplay. In Darksiders, the game had almost an overwhelming amount of features and equipment to the point some of the button inputs became absurd. 

Anyway wrapping up, last year I made alot of effort to make sure I made the most of the mechanics and features I designed in my games. Different rules, and mechanics have different requirements depending on the game. Whilst a huge amount of skill, time and money goes into making open world games it’s a bit of cop out in a way to just let the player decide what to do and not present any interesting obstacles for them to overcome. My work this year will revolve around making efficient level designs based around a few good simple mechanics.

Technology Arms Race: Indie vs Retail

Indie games have been an area of interest for me since last summer when I was involved in developing an iphone app from scratch. It was during that job I discovered just how feasible it was for me (and most aspiring designers) to develop their very own concept, free from publishing bigwigs.

As some prep-work to year I’ve been doing some research into indie gaming, I’ve been recently reading ‘The Indie Game Development Survival Guide’ a book targeted at novice game designers with the dream of seeing their concepts realised. The book gives some good advice and information of the advantages and disadvantages of both types of gaming. Retail games have grown at an alarming rate. It’s strange to think how the video game industry has erupted into a billion dollar industry in just a couple of decades. The retail industry has become bloated and so expensive developers have become terrified of taking risks or experimenting with new ideas any more. After all, a single title could destroy a development company. After highly negative reviews of the 2008 PS3 exclusive Haze, the developers Free Radical Design (developers of the popular Timesplitters franchise) went into administration.

Haze was poorly received from reviewers and gamers alike and ended up being the last game developed by UK based Free Radical Design.

The retail gaming market has become ‘a technology arms race’ between developers. Publishers are more concerned with standing out and bettering the competition with their technology and fancy game engines. The games we see so much of, the cover based 3rd person shooters and military FPS are proven year in and year out to sell like hotcakes. Why would a publisher move from such a comfort zone? Especially with such large financial risks involved. So instead, the competition is fought with developers showing off their newest titles with better framerate, higher poly counts and photorealistic graphics. It’s become less about the game design and more about showing the newest fanciest technology on the market.

It makes clear sense. Nobody likes the idea of gambling their money, especially when they’re already producing products that are selling so successfully. As an individual, I don’t like that mentality. I’m a realist, I know video games are a commercial industry and money is needed to create more products for the gamers. There’s just something that bugs me whenever a form of entertainment whether it film, music or game becomes’ just’ a business. Games are supposed to be fun and exciting but there are always people who will jump on fun things and squeeze every penny they can from them.

But! From this a new and exciting potential is born. With retail games developing and growing at such a fast rate, new technology is discovered every year leaving the old and now inexpensive equipment for indie developers to scavenge. Unlike retail games, for indie developers the game design is EVERYTHING. Retail games stand out on their technology, indie games stand out on their concept/gameplay. With iTunes, PSN and Xbox Arcade it’s now a better time than ever for indie developers to get their games played by as many people as possible. Indie developers can take risks; they can experiment with little to no consequences.

Popular Indie games; Limbo from Playdead Studios, Flower from thatgamecompany and Angry Birds from Rovio.

This brings me back to the discussion in my last blog, the relationship between mechanics and the game design. That relationship between the two is important in all games, including retail games but for a large portion of the best selling games mechanics work the same. Press trigger to shoot, A to jump, X to reload etc. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had to look at an introduction manual, most games I get my hands on these days I already know from other games how they will handle. It’s only few and far between that a retail game will take me by surprise.

Since my M.A. is a rare opportunity for me to design retail games, I’d like to come up with some fun, unique, crazy concepts. I’d like to take risks in the same way indie developers can with their titles.

Plan for the Year

I've always been an ideas person. Never been a great artist and I can’t stand using Maya (the mere thought of the camera makes my blood boil). The start of every game comes from its core mechanics and the relationship between them and the environments in which to use those mechanics. I’d like to explore those relationships and find out just what gamers respond to.

It took me a LONG time to get out of the mindset of making games for myself instead of from others and I think it’s key to expand on that idea this year. Communication is the absolute key to a designer, putting your thoughts and concepts into someone else’s mind is the biggest challenge I think any creative job requires. Causing a reaction when you’ve got your idea in someone is something else entirely...

I’ve always been fascinated how stories can have such a powerful effect on people, films, music, books and video games. Out of all those media forms video games, I’d say, have had the biggest impact on me. It wasn’t really till the late 90’s when games like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Oddworld, Spyro, Ocarina of Time, these games all had a massive impact on me as a child. I was a slave to many of those games, offering up my social life in a heartbeat for just a few more minutes with them. They brought out a feeling in me nothing else ever has.

The question I ask myself is, why? Why did they make me feel like that? I’ve since made it life ambition to somehow find a way to create and give that amazing feeling to others. To this day I can’t work out what it was about those games which made them feel so special to me. Sure I was a kid and more easily impressed those days, in my age I've become more cynical and more difficult to please but I can still go back now, play those games and get that same magic feeling. At first I put it down to clear nostalgia. Memory is very unreliable and nostalgia allows me to overlook any flaws and chalk it down to ‘Well it IS 10 years old...’.  I wish I could play Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil 2 in 2010 for the first time and see how I would react to it nostalgia free.

Saying that I still stand by the fact that Resident Evil 2 and Metal Gear Solid are excellent games even by today’s standards. People will whinge about the pre-rendered and fixed camera of Resident Evil or the lack of first person perspective in Metal Gear Solid but the point is those games were designed with those mechanics in mind.

It infuriates me to no end when people complain that a mechanic from one game isn’t present in another. The environments and obstacles in Metal Gear Solid were not designed for first person perspective shooting; introducing that mechanic on a whim would simply break the game. Funnily enough, that’s just what the Silicon’ Knights remake on the GameCube ‘Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes’ did. Keeping the environment and level designs 99% in tact from the original they implemented all the new mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 2; first person aiming, rolling, climbing, holding hostages etc. But really all this did for me was make the entire game feel shallow and empty. All these features had no place or actual use in the game.

The first boss against Revolver Ocelot is a battle of stamina and wit...- Oh wait, just hit L and shoot him in the head.

The Resident Evil remake on the GC on the other hand is a fantastic example of a remake done right. It didn't simply take the environments from the Playstation original and improve models/texture resolutions; it took the original game and added dozens of extra content and improvements to make use of the new mechanics and features created for the remake.

In the original, kill a zombie and it's body will disappear. In the remake, kill a zombie and it'll come back to life as a super zombie and rip your head off.

These games only highlight the importance of the relationship between the game design and the game mechanics. What's also important is the effect these games have on us and why they have that effect. I'm sure I'm not alone in experiencing the awe-inspiring moment you first sail the sea in Wind Waker, the terrifying tension whilst traversing Silent Hill or the sense of 'badassery' from ripping out a Cyclops eye in God of War. This year it will be my job of finding out how these feelings and effects can be applied through game mechanics and level design.

Aren't you going to buy me dinner first?

First thing about me as a designer/student, I’m a perfectionist. For most my life I’ve figured if you’re not going to be the best there’s no point in trying at all.(link pessimistic) This is both a good and bad quality to have as a designer. Good, because you’ll never settle with what you’ve got, you’ll always strive for the impossible even when you know you’ll never reach it. Bad, because I’ll never take pride or satisfaction in the work I’ll do. I will always look back and say it could have done better.

I've always made sure that for better or for worse, my work is different. Whether it’s awful or brilliant as long as it’s different that’s all that’s mattered. Good design is subjective. People can argue whether being original is necessary in good design and I’m well aware that originality is obviously not the only component in good design. Plenty of good games are derivative of other games that came before them. 

Take Uncharted 2 for example, receiving overwhelming acclaim from critics and gamers alike claimed by many to be the benchmark for all 3rd person shooters to come.  No doubt few games since have even come cross to the production values and gorgeous design of Uncharted 2 but for me at least, a ‘benchmark’ is all it is. Uncharted 2 is just an accumulation of every good 3rd person shooter that came before it. I could not find a single unique mechanic in the game. From Tomb Raider’s platforming to Gears of Wars cover based combat every piece of the game that ‘worked’ is derivative from another successful title.  To its credit, Uncharted 2 imitates those titles to perfection but the game just stands on shoulders on the giants that came before it.

Needs more chest high walls.

At times I find the games industry in a bit of a sorry state.  So many games these days are obsessed with their aesthetic and graphic power instead of actual innovative compelling game design. Every time a new Call of Duty is announced or spoke about I roll my eyes and feel all the motivation in my body sucked out of me. I’m not having a go at quality and skill gone into making those games...but; with an industry as exciting and potential filled as video games it’s just a tad disheartening the most popular and best selling game to represent the medium is ‘another’ military simulator. 

So my stance has always been to create something a bit different. To break away from the incestuous mess forming within the industry. Whether or not this will be a desirable or off putting state of mind for an employer to hire me in the future? Who knows.

As of July 2010 I have been employed under an internship for ‘Flash Bang Science’, a company determined to make science more fun for school children. I and Dan Startin (another M.A. student) were recommended to Flash Bang Science by our course leader Bev Bush for our success on winning the Mobile Bullets Contest in Summer 2009, successfully having a game (Cabbin’ Frenzy!) published on iTunes. Without going into too much detail our job at Flash Bang Science has tasked me and Dan the job of bringing the ‘Fun Stuff’ section of their website to life through interactive mediums like flash games. It’s been great being able to apply our skills to industries other than just the games industry and I’m sure in the coming months some of our work will become visible on the site.

Anyway I think it’s time to wrap up this lengthy introduction, hopefully I’ll update this more than twice a year but time shall tell.

Blog Virginity

After finishing my B.A. Honours in Games Design at the University of Central Lancashire with a 1^st class degree, tradition has it (apparently) for the university to pay for 1^st class students to take the M.A. (Masters Degree) free of charge. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth it seemed silly not to persuade one more year of education on the bill of the uni I just spent a ridiculous amount of money on with tuition fees. Besides that, I planned on taking the next year or so of my life to build up a portfolio of work to take to interviews for future employers but then I realised...how do I do that? The M.A. seemed like a perfect excuse to take a year building up my portfolio then getting another certificate at the end of it.

As part of the M.A. we are apparently required to keep a ‘reflective diary’ of some sort. Whether this be a hand written document or an online medium is up to us the individual and considering I get about twice as much written using a computer I opted for the easier method.

So the purpose of this blog is to be a reflection, documentation and extension of the thoughts and progresses of my work. Being that, I’m going to go on a limb and assume that means this diary should be an unfiltered, non-formal type of documentation (e.g. no swearing or ranting). That said, I think it’s important to keep what I say as pure and as spontaneous as the thoughts and ideas that come into my head are.

Another thing that has put me off ever blogging is the idea of me coming across as pretentious and arrogant. Sadly, it is very difficult to avoid that so I must try keeping that to a minimum.