always be sure to think in three dimensions when designing your level, and use verticality to keep the space interesting and fun to navigate! There’s a good reason why DICE kept the combat in Mirror’s Edge nice and light.Īnd be careful not to fall into the same trap as Khan.
the navigational and martial elements of the level would be completely at odds with each other. Imagine the intense combat of Modern Warfare 2 in the crazy parkour levels of Mirror’s Edge. The main caveat while designing fun navigability is that it should not come at the expense of your other gameplay elements. Is it tense and exciting? Absolutely! Modern Warfare’s Favella level is also an excellent example of verticality in level design, which can be an important aspect in making a level fun to navigate. 2).įigure 2: Modern Warfare 2 – the Favella level in MW2 is a maze of crazy buildings, with enemies coming at you from all sides. It is entirely appropriate to hide areas from the player, to add depth and replayability through exploration (as long as you provide the necessary visual or narrative clues), or to create areas where the player feels lost or confused, to create a sense of dramatic tension (Fig. Whilst basic progress through the level should be effortless, navigational gameplay can also be used to create fun. but here it is important to understand the difference between “intuitive” and “fun”. This may seem like a fairly obvious guideline. Even the screensavers on office computers help to point the player in the right direction. 1).įigure 1: Mirror’s Edge - in DICE’s seminal 1st person parkour game, the entire art style is geared to guide the player elegantly through the level. From an aesthetic aspect, a game’s levels should all work together to create a consistent visual language, through the use of colour and form, that the player can learn, to progress intuitively through the level (Fig. Careful layout, lighting, signage and other visual cues should create a natural “flow” to the level that guides the player instinctively through it. In most cases, the player’s core method of interaction with your level will be navigation – the process of actually traversing the level. Instead, I’ve used them as a loose template, to create ten Ramsian principles for designing compelling videogame levels (with the occasional detour into the realms of systems and narrative design) supported by some examples of great games in which you can observe these principles at work. Whilst these principles serve as a fantastic guide for product design, and, with a bit of creative interpretation, high-level game design, applying them directly to level (and mission) design required slightly too much force. I looked to my classic design background for inspiration, and was reminded of Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design. Whilst each approach had its advantages, it occurred to me that there must be a way of formalising the core elements of good level design in order to create levels that are both logical and innovative. Some had a logical, almost robotic approach to constructing levels, whereas others just threw as many ideas at the wall as possible, in the hope that something would stick. One thing that surprised me was that each of these studios had a totally different approach to level design, even though the basic content was extremely similar. Over the years I’ve had the privilege of creating levels at many great game studios.