Challenge Design
The focus of today’s lab is to start thinking about your level design. In the past, we had students make a level design document in order to make their level ideas concrete. However, you already have a lot of work to do in this class, and this document was heavy on the designer just when you need art assets for your game. Therefore, we have demoted the level design to (two) communication labs this semester.
In this lab we want you to brainstorm building-blocks for your level design. We called these design patterns in the level design lecture, and we review them below. We ask that someone take notes or sketch these ideas while the lab is ongoing. While you will not turn in anything for a grade, we will be holding a critique session this Friday to review your work.
While this is going on, the TAs will be circling the room and occassionally giving their own feedback on your discussion. If anything is unclear about this assignment, or the document in general, please ask them. They have been through this process before (some of the TAs have done this multiple times).
Table of Contents
Building Blocks
A building block is a mechanic/challenge pairing that represents a single something that the player must overcome to solve the level. It is not the entire level, but only part of the level. Most levels are a sequence of building blocks. Sometimes, building blocks are put on top of each other so the player must overcome them simultaneously. But either way, the key to level design is understanding your building blocks.
To give you an idea of what we mean, consider the following storyboard from the 2014 game Beck & Chuck. In this picture, the player has to make it past a missile launcher. The missile launcher is placed at a choke point, restricting the players maneuverability. So the player must either destroy the launcher or time his/her actions very carefully.
When building blocks appear in a lot of games, they get called a design pattern. Many of your favorite genres are defined by their design patterns. Here are a few examples:
Platformers
The classic design pattern for a platformer is the high-precision jump. The gap between two platforms is so large that you must make a running jump just as you reach the end of the first platform. Jump to early (or stop running before you make the jump) and you will not clear the distance. Jump to late and you fall off the first platformer.
Another design pattern are monsters and mobile hazards. Goomba-stomping aside, most monsters in platformers are to be avoided. The challenge is to time your jump to make it over the (moving) monster.
When you combine these design patterns together, you get a particularly insidious challenge. You have to jump just at the right time to make it across, but avoiding the monster may cause you to jump to early or break your timing.
Stealth Games
The basic design pattern in a stealth game is cover. Guards cannot see you while you are behind walls, crates or other obstructions. You therefore need to move quickly from cover to cover so that you are never seen by the guards.
Stealth games also have patrol patterns. This is a loop that the guards make about the level. You learn this pattern, and take advantage of it to keep your player actively out of the line of sight of the guards.
Good stealth games combine these two patterns together in a single level. You move to cover to keep from being seen. It is only safe to come out of cover when the guard moves away from the open space between you and the next cover position.
Cover Shooters
As the name implied, cover shooters also use cover as a design pattern. While enemies can see you behind cover, they cannot hit you with weapons either. Of course you cannot hit them while in cover either. So the challenge is to come out of cover at just the right time to hit another enemy.
Cover shooters often have an arena layout as part of their level design. This is a design pattern to keep the player from “turtling”. Cover only protects you from one side, and in an arena, and enemy can flank you behind the cover. So these two design patterns combine to force the player to move about the arena.
Pitfalls
The concept of building blocks is purposefully vague, so it is hard to get them wrong. However, there are two important mistakes that you should avoid.
Word the Pattern from the Designer’s Perspective
When you create a challenge, the challenge must be something that the designer has done, like place an enemy or create a gap. It cannot be something that the player does, like kill the enemy or jump the gap. Because you are not the player and you do not know what the player will do.
Of course, when we construct challenges, we want the player to do those things. But that means the challenge must constrain the player to force them to do those things. For example, a gap before the exit forces the player to jump the gap because that is the only way they can reach the exit. This is how you should think of your challenges.
A good rule of thumb to avoid this challenge is to give your pattern a name. Is the name of the pattern what the player must do to overcome it? Then it is possibly a bad pattern (because the player may not do that).
Make the Pattern Failable
When you make the challenge pattern, ask yourself “can the player possibly fail this challenge.” If the answer is no, this is a bad pattern. You do not have to make the challenge very difficult. It could be as simple as jumping over a small hurdle. But there has to be something that if the player does not do it (either by choice or lack of skill), the challenge fails.
Examples
We want you to spend this lab time coming up with building blocks for your own game. We do not want complete levels; we want simple challenges (or pairing of challenges) that you will later use to build your levels. A good indication of whether a challenge is a building block is if you can sketch it in a single storyboard frame.
To give you some idea of what we are looking for, here are some building-blocks from semesters past, when we still had the level design document. All of these are level design documents (though the format has changed many times over the years). So you should only pass attention to the parts of the documents that we highlight.
Modosu
Modosu was developed in Spring 2020, which was COVID semester and the last time we assigned this document. That semester was also the semester of mini-golf games, as we had three of them. They are also good examples of design patterns, as the design is all about setting up the golf course obstacles. Modosu was a golf game with possession, as you passed the golf ball hot-potato style between golems. Look at how this defines their design patterns.
Low On Ink
Low On Ink was another golf game from Spring 2020. This one involved color matching. The player is must make all the walls the same color, by painting them with a ball of the correct color. It is instructive to see how their design is both similar to and different from Modosu.
Parole in One
The last of the golf games from 2020, Parole in One combined golf and stealth. You can see the patrol patterns present in a standard stealth game, but this is combined with patterns that force the player to engage with these patrols. And that is important for any stealth game, because if I can simply avoid the patrols, it is not a challenge.
Nightwatch
Another game from 2020, Nightwatch was a two-phase game where you placed guards during the day, and fended off thieves at night. Their design patterns are all about ways in which they can reduce the effectiveness of the players’ guards. However, these patterns were very specific, and we were a little concerned about how they could be tuned.
Astrobeat
The last game in this list from 2020, Astrobeat was a rhythm game where the player orbitted planets to the beat. But notice how the design patterns are not about the beat. They are things that the player needs to do to succeed. Forcing the player to do these on the beat simply makes them harder.
Astrobeat
Winner of Most Polished Game in the Spring 2014 Showcase, Dash was the start of our current approach to level design. While this document starts off with tutorial levels, it is the section on intermediate levels that you should look at. Here they isolate their individual challenges, which is what we would later call patterns.
Black Friday
The audience favorite in the Spring 2014 Showcase, Black Friday had a very different style of level design than other games. Instead of static obstacles, its level design is about controlling crowd density. Once again, you can see this in the section on intermediate levels, where they pull out their individual challenges.
Critique
Level design is an iterative process, and we would like to give you some feedback early on in the process. Therefore, the lecture at the end of this week is a critique session. There is no official document for level design, so this is one of the main times you will get any feedback from us outside of your milestone demonstrations. For details on how this critique will be structured, see the instructions for the activity.
With that said, you have a lot to do this week if you expect to finish alpha release in time. Therefore, we are not expecting you to do any work outside of lab. Finish what you can in lab today. On the day of critique, bring whatever you finished. If the blocks are incomplete, that is okay. But please make an effort to complete as much as possible during class.