ECGC 2015 - Level design like an architect

Editor's Notes

• #3: As a developer, community leader, and teacher, I mentor a lot of new designers through the game development process, and I think that level design is just starting to be understood as more than a mechanical process in game development.
• #4: For a little over a decade, game design has grown as a field of study and despite the “theory vs. practice” debate in the industry, we’re starting to see theory applied in really cool ways in released and recognized game products.
• #5: A problem that we face is that from the current point of view, game design as a field of design theory is thought of as a sort of monolithic thing, but in reality there’s many facets and sub-disciplines that have yet to benefit from the same level of scrutiny. One of these overlooked areas is level design.
• #6: This is why you see so many people saying that they’re a level designer once they learn how to operate level editors like Unreal or Hammer – there isn’t a view that level design needs any deeper knowledge than simply knowing the tools involved. Other design fields can’t get away with this, so we shouldn’t allow this either.
• #7: Instead, we should develop level design through rigorous study – creating a set of applied theories that can be utilized to analyze and make better game worlds. For my part, I’m going to look at real-world precedent for level design – architecture.
• #8: Some level designers might say “but we already do that – we already look at pictures of real architecture for inspiration.” But many people still focus on the aesthetic elements of these examples rather than the experiential qualities these spaces have. Examples like these are really good, we just need to know how to read them properly.
• #9: Architects don’t only look at the aesthetic elements of a space, but they also consider How humans interact with that space How the space responds to the needs of occupants How spaces shape action and experience How a space affects the world around it
• #10: In these ways, we could learn a lot about how architects view space and apply them to how we understand and plan game worlds.
• #11: So what are we talking about today? If you’re familiar with my work or have read my book, you’ll see a lot of familiar stuff. But I’m remixing this information to start exploring the ways in which level designers think about their work. This talk will cover how we see levels, how we play levels, how we start planning and goal-setting for our levels, and finally methods to follow when constructing levels.
• #13: In his book, Think Like An Architect, architect Hal Box proposes 10 ways to develop one’s architectural “vision” and aid in building analysis.
• #14: What this amounts to is a thoughtful and observant approach to viewing buildings. Absorbing the experience by looking at features and considering elements that the lay observer would not.
• #15: This is counter to how many players enjoy game environments, by paying little attention to such spatial qualities. You can’t really blame them with so many other things demanding their attention.
• #16: As designers though, it behooves us to think in these ways and employ them so that we can better plan meaningful game experiences.
• #17: Based on Box’s own ways of seeing for architecture, we can then adopt a similar method for game levels with a focus on observing how a game level facilitates a game’s mechanics, how art is used, and how the level paces gameplay.
• #18: So if we adopt these methods and see game levels the way that architects see space, how can we make our own gameplay time into meaningful design analysis?
• #19: When architects observe space, they record what they see in sketchbooks. Sketchbooks can be an organic extension of the architect’s thought processes, allowing them to store information gleaned from their environment, jot down ideas, take notes, or store important clippings.
• #20: A recent article on GameJolt.com’s Fireside blog by user AlexVsCoding makes similar appeals for game designers to use sketchbooks, citing that they help “backup the brain”, get inspired by everyday events, and simply practice art. When playing games, it can be good to keep a gameplay journal and sketchbook handy to record interesting moments of gameplay or level design for inspiration in your own work.
• #21: So how do you record interesting level elements while video games? For me, I like to analyze game spaces with simple architectural drawings, then create diagrams out of them. The first of these drawings is the building plan – a top-down view of the space’s design.
• #22: You can see that by adding a visual language and some notes to plan sketches, it’s possible to record lots of information about how it feels to be in certain spaces. To the left is a diagram of the public and private areas of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and to the right is a diagram of the train station of Half-Life 2.
• #23: Building sections – diagrams where the designer draws as though they have sliced a design open vertically and are looking inside – can perform similar functions.
• #24: With a visual language, notes, or however else you wish to record information, you can back up a lot of your experience into very usable section diagrams. These are especially useful in 2D side-scrollers or when you are analyzing three-dimensional spatial relationships.
• #25: These types of diagrams can also be used for planning your own levels. An important step for architects is “pre-design”, which we can use here to start establishing goals for how we will build our game levels.
• #26: To start this discussion, we should look at the first type of drawing many architects make, the parti. The parti is a simple formal diagram that describes a design’s core formal idea.
• #27: This is something we’ve done a bit on indie games I’ve worked on. These are diagrams that another level designer created for a ball-rolling platform game we worked on. Remember that these are coming way before any actual prototyping and instead help us create design goals for levels.
• #28: Inspiration can come from existing pieces as well – you don’t always have to generate your own diagrams. For a recent project, I created a game based on Russian Constructivist art and utilized existing artworks as the parti for levels in that game. I based each world of the game on a work by artist El Lissitzky and tried to determine from each piece what its overall game mechanic would be. This allowed me to give each world a distinctive theme and feel.
• #29: Another useful planning tool are axonometric drawings, which are 3D drawings derived from plans. To create an axonometric drawing, you turn a plan 45 degrees and draw a building’s forms extruding upward from the plan as shown in this sectional axonometric drawing of a church’s dome.
• #30: When I use axons in gameplay planning, I often don’t draw them to reflect how I’ll arrange level geometry, but rather to plan the types of gameplay I would have in one space and how I would enter and exit the level.
• #31: Lastly, I’d like to talk about methods that affect the way we design and construct levels.
• #32: So when we design levels, very few of us create levels out of completely custom geometry. Instead it’s far more common to derive levels from a reusable set of art assets. When you attach behaviors to these assets, they become reusable game objects.
• #33: Once you demonstrate these objects to players several times, they gain meaning and become symbolic to the player of a specific type of gameplay.
• #34: So something that’s been mulling around in my head as I design levels has been a quote by the architect Louis Kahn. In a talk at the 1972 IDCA International Design Conference, Kahn envisioned a talk with a brick where he says, “what do you want, brick?” and the brick responds “I like an arch.” and though Kahn insists that arches are too expensive and there are cheaper alternatives, the brick remains steadfast that it wants to be turned into an arch.
• #35: I realized recently that I’ve been saying this a lot to people: “what does your game want to be” or “I think your level wants to be this…” or “I think that object wants to be that…” And after getting funny looks from fellow designers and students I realized that embracing happy accidents of design and different points of view was essential to my own design processes. (tell story about Taro and speed booster in Swarm here)
• #36: Where this ties together Kahn’s conversation with bricks and symbolic assets is the idea that as designers, we may see a game object in a very specific way, but others may see it completely differently and invent other types of gameplay with it. Likewise, the rules of how something is written in your code may cause it to behave in a way you didn’t anticipate.
• #37: In conclusion – architectural thought for level design involves lots of rigorous planning and methodical observation of design precedents. Good designers are going to find meaningful ways in which gamespaces will translate game mechanics into gameplay for the benefit of the player. However, architectural thought also embraces new viewpoints from fellow designers and from playtesters and synthesizes them into a cohesive whole. Thinking in these terms, we can push level design past being a purely tool or technologically based practice into a meaningful discipline where design and craft combine.