Sciman101

Sciman101

@Sciman101

I like to draw and code and sometimes do other things.

log inask
Discord
@sciman101
h*r voice: emaaaaiiiillll
hello@sciman.info
Website
sciman.info/
Sciman101
@Sciman101
epiglottal-axolotl
@epiglottal-axolotl
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
epiglottal-axolotl
@epiglottal-axolotl asked:

Do you have any tips for someone who wants to get better at level design? I was working on a tactical-puzzle RPG for several years (sort of like "what if Into the Breach was open-world", with some retro Zeldalike flavor) and I consistently found myself having immense difficulty coming up with dungeon rooms (both puzzle-based and combat-based) that felt engaging and appropriately challenging. Sometimes I would come up with a game-mechanical element that felt like it had a lot of design space, and then completely come up empty when trying to actually make it work in practice.

god i wish i knew how to get better at level design. i feel like i am total junk at it with a handful of accidents that i mostly like. every new fox flux level is like pulling teeth until something finally falls out of it

the ways i try to muddle through it are mainly:

  • look at the games that inspired you to make this one. really fucking look at them. distill the stuff you found inspiring down to base elements and then build on top of that. like, i keep having to look back at baba to calibrate what i think is a good pace of introducing puzzle element interactions (because i already know how my own game works and it's hard to get my head out of it).

    this is what they mean by "great artists steal". fox flux does not look anything like any particular game but i am absolutely trying to learn puzzle pacing from baba, collection from wario land, interactions from chip's challenge. these are little design threads from things i liked, things that worked, and i want to understand their essence and build on it

  • gamers™ use "gimmick" disparagingly but never listen to gamers about video games. gimmicks are fantastic. it's another word for "theme". if you land on something that seems interesting then fucking run with it. the doom community scoffs at crate mazes but they also voted their favorite stock doom level to be E2M2 Crate Maze. sandy petersen said he tried to build every level around a different idea and it shows.

    all the most memorable game boy zelda dungeons are built around a cool idea. eagle's tower collapses and physically changes the layout (and even then it's far more conservative than it could've been). mermaid's cave is the one dungeon accessible from two time periods. and of course half the time the item you get is a bit part of it — tail cave is based around holes but that makes you feel really powerful when suddenly you can jump over them!

  • there are things that are unique to your game. make sure each of them is getting sprinkled in regularly. if you're blanking, see if it's been a while since you used one of them. the gbc zeldas just had a sidescroller part every so often. baba is you mostly settles into using obvious objects for simple roles (rocks tend to be pushable etc), but every so often it trips you up by not doing that. wario land 3 just has stuff for you to break because breaking stuff is cool and your primary ability

  • a lot of level design is filler. again i don't mean this disparagingly — i just mean that a world cannot be built solely out of really cool landmarks and setpieces, that there is necessarily connective tissue between them, and that stuff is just Regular Gameplay.

    and this is the stuff i struggle with the most because i always want everything to be cool and interesting. but the player is fine with like, fighting an enemy or jumping over something or whatever. that's necessarily going to be most of the game. how much of super mario bros is just you and a koopa? how much of link's awakening is you and an octorok or something?

    but this is the stuff the player is like 60% here for. no one plays a zelda-like if they don't already just enjoy hitting guys with a sword. the core loop should be fun on its own and you shouldn't second-guess giving the player some space to just enjoy it. (this also gives you "regular" rooms to go back and hide interesting things in later!)

    in fact sometimes i've made levels that are too puzzle-dense and i've had to go back and space it out with some breathing room in between. going from one major Thing to another back-to-back-to-back is kind of exhausting!

    i guess the tricky bit is making the filler not feel repetitive, and i don't fully understand that yet, but i think even minor variations on the geometry + resources + obstacles might be enough. super mario bros is still fondly remembered even though 95% of it is jumping on solid square blocks in different arrangements. apparently you can get a lot of mileage out of different arrangements of solid square blocks! even aiming to land on one tile vs two makes a big difference

if anyone has any good advice though i'd love to hear it because i feel like i struggle endlessly with this. but it's another one of those creative + intermediate-expert + semi-obscure fields where it feels like there's no way forward but to just keep trying (and peeking over others' shoulders) until it clicks

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

JumbocactuarX27
@JumbocactuarX27

Thank you for this post. Some of it is stuff I knew but couldn't easily put into words. The bit about filler is something I really needed to hear. Level design is the hardest thing in the world for me (that and marketing) so I appreciate your insights here.

login to reply
huitzilopochtli
@huitzilopochtli

I don't think calling it filler is right... in mario bros, sure you're jumping on blocks, but they're always different arrangements, and they're meaningfully different, and it seems to me that the level design is in making that change and progression interesting. Also action games tend to ask for consistency from the player, so making them repeat a task without failing as a consistency challenge, or peppering a previously presented challenge throughout a level, are ways to develop and reinforce those skillls; but puzzle games, specially puzzle games that are structured in separate levels, do tend to have zero filler and be super dense, and every level is super distinct.

Also the idea that having major things back to back is exhausting, and the solution is filling in space, seems strange... it's good to keep in mind pacing and having an intensity curve to how things develop, maybe by interspersing major things that are of different intensity, but putting in filler that doesn't have further interest seems like the wrong solution, reminds me of people in the quake mapping discord mentioning putting a corridor between encounters as a "rest" between them. Also if you do have pacing in mind explicitly, you can use the possibility of deliberately putting in many high intensity things close together, or many low intensity things, to have larger contrasts.

login to reply
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i don't mean "filler" disparagingly! i don't have a non-charged word for it. but it literally fills the game, fills all the space between unique moments like bosses or whatever. it's just the regular moment-to-moment gameplay. it's what cake is, to a cake: the stuff that goes between the icing. it can't all be icing.

filler shouldn't be _un_interesting. it should just be, the game. because it is the game

login to reply
huitzilopochtli
@huitzilopochtli

ah ok gotcha. I guess it could be called the "meat and potatoes" or something... or the "core aspect" of the game, to convey that it is the game. But really I don't necessarily get the distinction you make, between the landmarks and cool setpieces, and the rest of the game as the connective tissue, because it really is kind of part of the same, that regular gameplay can be really flashy and meaningful and unique, and setpieces can be an adornment... or even just part of the same stuff, just with different emphases. Trying to make it not "feel repetitive" seems like the wrong approach, it seems like treating it as a secondary concern, whereas it seems to me to be the main aspect, you don't make it repetitive because it already is the whole thing you're trying to do, it's all unique. There's no separation between cake and icing, it is a whole tornado of deliciousness.

You're making a puzzle platformer, and you mention making places too puzzle dense, I guess those two parts, the puzzles and the platforming, seem to be two different things, one maybe seems more flashy than the other, but the puzzles are already the "part that fills", because it's the game right? I guess if you also want the platforming, it just sometimes seems imbalanced if you have this whole other part to the game, and it focuses too hard on the puzzles? so maybe the important part is figuring out the role the platforming plays relative to the puzzles? and then making platforming sections that are just as cool and flashy to you as the puzzles are. Because it's all The Thing You're Trying To Do, and I guess you already figured what you were interested in doing with the puzzles, and you just have to figure out what you're interested in with the platforming, and do the same kind of level design as the puzzles, now with the platforming. And then it will be Whole.

login to reply
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

the trouble i run into is that the puzzles are the unique part, which are relatively easy to make interesting: take a mechanic, make the player figure out how it works. but the platforming is, at its core, running and jumping, which people (including Fucking Nintendo) have been making for decades. so how do i make that unique? i don't know, and i don't have that many unique platforming ideas, so i tend to do the platforming stuff as kind of a trickle. so maybe the player doesn't notice? i don't know

what i'm saying is that i don't really need to make it completely unlike every other game ever made, because running and jumping is still a good time. shake it up a little bit, yes, but it's not like someone is going to try a platformer and walk away in disgust going "this is just platforming"

login to reply
huitzilopochtli
@huitzilopochtli

yeah it's really hard to make something unique in that sense. It's true that you don't need to make it completely unlike every other game, if you don't feel as strongly interested and have as many ideas for platforming, it's completely good to just make it running and jumping and have your focus in the puzzles. I get a similar sense of difficulty making new things for something like quake, making a quake map, without modding, it's basically iterating on something completely established. People on the community often tell new mappers to learn to make good "meat and potatoes" levels before trying to make something that's really outside the usual for quake, to learn to make the gameplay good.

But I think it's really interesting to try to make a really unique idea in that space regardless of all the surface novelty having been trodden already, and it seems like that's where level design skill really shines. It has to be possible right, it's basically like making new ideas in music, or painting, it's all done using basically the same set of sounds or colours, the initial novelty of "here's a new sound" doesn't exist anymore, but there's still infinity new possible ideas regardless. The initial novelty of the first platformer games doesn't exist anymore, but that was low hanging fruit, and now it's harder, but that higher fruit is all the more interesting, there are more intricate ideas there. Making a completely new mechanic and making players figure it out is interesting and outwardly unique, but making new sophisticated combinations of existing stuff seems where level design expertise shines the most, thinking about the functions those established elements have and can have when combined in different ways.

I recently saw droqen comment on a book about platforming which might be a useful read for you?
https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1834669758953721929
thinking in those ways, dissecting elements of the design space really finely, has helped me find a direction to develop more interesting ideas

login to reply
Pinned Tags