General Principles of Level Design - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 361

■ The initial conditions of the level, including the state of various changeable
features (Is the drawbridge initially up or down?), the number of artificial opponents
the player faces, the amounts of any resources that the player controls at the begin-
ning of the level, and the location of resources that may be found in the landscape.
■ The set of challenges the player will face within the level. Many games offer
challenges in a linear sequence; if so, level designers determine what that sequence
will be, construct a suitable space, and place the challenges within it. In other
games, the challenges may be approached in a number of different possible
sequences or any order at all; see the later sections “Layouts” and “Progression
and Pacing” for further discussion.
■ The termination conditions of the level, ordinarily characterized in terms of
victory and/or loss. In many games, levels can only be won but not lost, and in a
few, such as the default mode in SimCity , levels can only be lost and never won.
■ The interplay between the gameplay and the game's story, if any. The writer
of the story must work closely with the level designer to interweave gameplay and
narrative events.
■ The aesthetics and mood of the level. Whereas the game designer and art
director specify the overall tone of a level and artists create the specific models and
textures, level designers take the general specifications and decide how to implement
those plans. If the plan says, “Level 13 will be a scary haunted house,” the level
designers decide what kind of a house and how to make it feel scary and haunted.
Level designers normally construct all these parts using tools created specifically
for the purpose. Some games, including Warcraf t III and Half-Life 2 , actually ship
their level design tools along with the game, so players can expand and customize
the game world; if you own one of these games, you can practice level design by
using those tools.
Level design could easily be the subject of an entire book. However, this chapter
concentrates on introducing the general principles and the process of level design.
Key Design Principles
Two t y pes of desig n pr inciples w ill help you desig n a level: universal level design prin-
ciples aimed at designing levels in any kind of game, and genre-specific level design
principles , which focus on design issues specific to the different genres. This section
addresses each of these in turn.
Universal Level Design Principles
Barbarossa: The [Pirate's] Code is more what you'd call “guidelines” than actual rules.
— P IRATES OF THE C ARIBBEAN : T HE C URSE OF THE B LACK P EARL