Level Design - Starting Area for Prototype
On a current game project, the prototype reached a stage where the core gameplay loop needed to support external testing by players that didn’t have any part or insight into the design of the game. The test level was designed to support this testing, including handling some of the tutorialization and contextualization that players would need to engage with the design.
Design Goals
Tutorialize the following:
Locomotion and input familiarization.
The game contains different types of interactable objects including:
Collectables - Objects that can be picked up
Interactables - Objects that can be interacted with for a discrete mechanical result
Operables - Objects that will allow for further interaction via some kind of prompt window
The game contains different types of environmental assets including:
Decorations - Objects with no impact to locomotion (e.g. grass, debris, etc.)
Hazards - Objects that will slow the avatar’s speed when traveling through them and limit player view by blocking their flashlight (e.g. tall grass, bushes, etc.)
Obstructions - Objects that can prevent movement through them (e.g. trees, large rocks, buildings)
Permit player orientation for deliberate navigation without any map, mini-map, or other navigational assistance.
Techniques and Approaches
Playground - Create a “safe” area where players are free to experiment without distraction. Typically these areas allow the players to orient themselves without distraction or hazards. E.g. Super Mario Bros. starts the first level without any platforms, enemies, or collectables for player to get a feel for movement and jumping.
Exposure - Have the players encounter new mechanics and ideas with the context and incentives to explore them. In many games this technique will be used throughout the game as it introduces variants of existing mechanics, or wholly new ones. E.g. Super Mario Bros. has player encounter platforms, fall hazards, the pan lock, Goombas, and destructible blocks one at a time and in combinations that they should be looking out for.
Visual Language Primer - Use proximity, juxtaposition, contrast, and other visual design techniques to introduce players to deliberate visual design choices to encourage zero level heuristics that can be used to communicate with players moving forward.
Design Challenges
Wave Shooter vs. Playground - The game features waves of scheduled enemies that will be charging the players’ avatars, which is at odds with the need to provide players a playground to explore without distractions.
Level-based Exposure vs. Interface-based Presentation - The game features a number of variations of the same base interaction policy. It is generally accepted that effective affordance communication can be the fastest and most elegant way to get players to grok the intentions of a design, and an interface can provide a high degree of nuance at the cost of requiring familiarization on its own. Testing the efficacy of the design to expose players to these concepts can help focus the work that the UI has to do, keeping that familiarization and visual cognitive load down.
Visual Language Idea Distinction - Particularly when a level’s size is at a premium and time is limited, the introduction of a game’s visual language conventions can become overwhelming and muddy - this would make effective testing challenging. It will as important to introduce these ideas in a way that create the opportunity for players to understand the embedded ideas, as it will be to keep the ideas distinct from each other so that the least efficacious ideas can be identified and improved upon.
First Pass Solutions
Making time - The first waves of enemies are spawned such that the player can have up to a minute before they encounter enemies of the first wave, especially if they stay in the starting area. This is achieved by spawning zone placement based on understanding the spawning algorithm’s behavior
The game’s spawning algorithm has to account for the location of two independent players, specifically it should try to spawn enemies in such a way that they are as close to the players as possible without being visible at the moment that it is instantiated. To do this, a collection of spawn-points will be considered based on their distance to players, with the closest three being removed from consideration.
For the starting area, the spawn points were distributed such that if players stayed in the starting area, they would need roughly a minute to reach the players.
Breathing room - To communicate the idea of safety of the starting area, the space was designed with an open space in the middle, visually separated from its surroundings with trees, and isolated with water. There are elements for the players to interact with, but room was left for the players to not feel boxed-in.
Orientation - The starting view of the level has the player facing the ship that they had landed on the island with, and would need to take off of the island.
To ensure that the players had a sense of direction and orientation, all of the elements that they can interact with are placed off to one side - in the direction that they need to go to get out of the starting area.
Exposure - Interactive elements that the player will need to engage with are placed around the starting area in such a way as to give a introductory subset of each interaction type, and placed in such a way as to ensure that the interaction zone in front of their avatar would very likely become visible whether they intended to interact with any of these elements or not.
Flashlights (collectables) were placed along the only way out of the starting area. The first was placed in a clear paved path, and the second was placed deliberately in an area with hazards. They are noticeable because they are lit items, and are spaced in such a way that players would have to deliberately attempt to avoid them without having the interaction progress UI appear above it. The interaction progress UI is positioned to cue the player as to what the interactive item is, and what button must be pressed to begin interacting with it.
The gear slot machine and the “leave island” menu (operables) were placed adjacent to the flashlights. They slot machine and the ship at the end of the dock are the most visually prominent and brightly lit features in the starting area. The intent was to similarly maximize the chances that players would encounter the interaction mechanic by visually drawing them to these types of objects.
The guard shack (interactable) was placed within view, but just outside of the starting area, beyond the immediate starting area, it is the only visible lit object. The navigable terrain around the first guard shack was deliberately bottlenecked slightly using sculpting and non-traversable assets to draw the players past the guard shack as a last ditch attempt to ensure that players encounter these types of objects before they are let loose on the rest of the island.
The environmental assets, particularly the hazards, which are meant to place players in deliberately compromising positions in the heat of combat, are deliberately designed to blend into their surroundings. The bush-type hazards which significantly slow down the player the most are more visible, while the tall grass-type hazards which only slightly slow down the player are less visible. A visual language convention make hazards identifiable by their shadow casting behavior, whereas the mechanically invisible decorations do not. To teach the players this convention.
The flashlights are placed the closest to the players and made as unavoidable as possible. The flashlights are the primary light source that players can use to identify the difference between decorations and hazards.
One flashlight was placed between the bush-types and tall grass-types, and the other again the same, but long a clear path. The intent of the design was to permit new players, between the two options, all possible combinatorial options to understand that:
1 - The bush-type and tall grass-type have different impacts on speed.
2 - The space necessary to pass between hazards without being slowed down is slightly smaller than the visible width of their character avatar.
With the exception of the path, there is no way to leave the starting area without being forced to pass through a hazard.
