The Problem That Stack Overflow Wouldn’t Let Me Post:
This entrepreneurial lifestyle is surprisingly boring. It needs plastic surgery so that its lord (me, in this case) can have some enjoyable feelings. Yes, of course, I’m in control of my feelings.
Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
Answer by Dan Taylor:
#1 A good level design makes it fun to navigate.
There is a difference between it’s fun to navigate versus it’s easy to navigate.
#2 A good level design doesn’t rely on words
A good piece of communication is like a properly broken circle. It’s not too big to be confusing, nor too small to be boring.
There are three types of narrative: explicit, implicit, and emergent. The best way to create an implicit narrative is called Mise-en-scène.
Level designers don’t create the emergent narrative, they enabled it by providing players with choice. However, too many choices leave users confused and in need of guidance.
#3 A good level design tells what to do but never how to do it.
To avoid that paralyzing freedom, the design should tell players what to do. Keep your guidance concise and clear. Only gives the players the information that’s absolutely necessary. There should always be multiple paths and improvisation should be encouraged rather than punished.
#4 A good level constantly teaches
The human brain enjoys processing patterns for storage and retrieval later. If this pattern analysis ends too soon, this processing stops, and the enjoyment ends. A good design prolongs this process by allowing learn => play => challenge => surprise.
#5 A good level is surprising
You need to keep everything fresh by not falling into a routine. A typical progress line is a roller coaster pattern. You have steadily increasing crescendos of intensity punctuated by troughs of slightly lower intensity. However, this pattern gets boring.
Fun is created through uncertainty by constantly flipping a player in and out of his comfort zone.
Taking risks is important if you want to stand out. You never know what’s good in real games when you can only think on paper, so test it frequently and early.
#6 A good level design empowers the player.
You should never give players a shopping list of missions because video games are essentially escapism. Why would people want to escape to somewhere that they could go in real life? Because real life sucks.
“He has to drive carefully so as not to upset the police.” from Charlie Brooker’s GamesWipe. Apparently, it’s not because he respects the driving policy.
In most games, the player wants to be badass. The players often need to make an arbitrary choice that will affect how the entire game handles for him/her with no knowledge of how their skill stacks up against the game mechanics.
#7 A good level design is easy, medium, and hard.
The king in the risk/reward game is Burnout where players can select the difficulty level dynamically.
#8 A good level design is efficient.
A game always has finite resources. Whether it’s technical limitations such as hardware, memory, pixel pushing power, to the real-world constraints such as production schedule, the number of people on your team, and the scope of your project. This means you need to make things nose to tail, do it more than once, and do them quickly. For this reason, modular is your friend. Therefore, level designers don’t create levels, they create a series of modular mechanic driven encounters.
To reuse the art created for levels, you want to backtrack, but backtracking isn’t cool. What you should do is to design bi-directional gameplay: the gameplay to get there is totally different than the gameplay on the way back. The ending of Astro Boy is disappointing, so people went back to the beginning of the game with all the power-ups and weapons they collected to replay it. Because now they can defeat the monsters that they couldn’t defeat before. What Astro Boy dis was to massage the players into playing the game twice.
#9 A good level design creates emotion.
In 2012, the US Supreme court declared video games are legally art. According to the dictionary, art is anything that’s created specifically to trigger emotion. For example, architectural theory. Windows below the knees are meant to trigger voyeurism. Windows above the shoulder are meant to invoke a feeling of persecution and imprisonment. You can create spatial empathy.
You can use tight corners to keep players tense and suspicious of claustrophobia. You can make your level labyrinthian to create confusion and panic. You can blow space wide open to create a feeling of isolation and epic scale. Even switching from a narrow space to a large space is a great technique to force the player to look at a specific vista to create a sense of wonder. You can bring verticality into the mix to create a feeling of persecution by attaching the player from above. You can create a feeling of vertigo by making the players scale a high mountain or a high building. You can create a feeling of hope by placing a reward at the top of a tall building.
Emotion is so important and you really should work backward. Your starting point should be the desired emotional response you want to invoke from the player, then you should drill down and select spatial parameters, narrative elements, and mechanics you want to use to elicit that emotion. In the Company of Heroes, you are asked to protect the town against the Nazi invasion force until allied reinforcements arrive. What they lied about this is the arrival of reinforcement isn’t triggered by a timer, but by the number of soldiers, you have left alive. They only ever appear when you have two soldiers left.
#10 A good level design is driven by mechanics.
Talk to your engineer and artists, because your design needs to showcase the work they did. Actually, your design should be driven by mechanics.
