Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
ChapTeR 7
Designing Levels
and the Game
Design Document
Coming up with the
idea for your game and deciding on the gameplay style,
the narrative, and the look of your characters are major parts of game design.
An important aspect of making the game is how you create and present the
content and how players interact with it.
This chapter discusses level design, which starts by planning the world, what
happens, and where it happens. Then you populate the world by determining
where the action, key events, and cinematic locations for the game will be.
Imagine you're leaving your home for a trip around the world. You'll want to
look at a map to plan where you'll go and what you'll do along the way, includ-
ing the points of interest you want to see, events you may want to attend, and
people you want to meet.
While “level design,” or content creation, is vastly different depending on
the type of game being created, for ease of use this chapter will focus on
level design as it is identified in the genre of action-adventure.
In addition, in this chapter we'll look at the Game Design Document (GDD),
which is the predominant tool game developers and publishers use to cata-
logue a game as it's developed. All the things addressed in this topic eventually
make their way into the GDD.
Level design
Spatial design
hub-and-spoke design
the Game design document
