Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
constructing the prototype. The process of making these lists may surprise you by
showing you just how much work goes into making even a relatively small level.
Before you choose a scope for your level, determine how much time and staff you
have available, taking into account any vacations and holidays that may be coming
up. Then assume that half of your team will be out sick for a week at some point
during the development process—it's entirely possible.
Now
think again about the
scope. How many models can your team build in a day? How quickly can you
detect an error, correct it, and test it again? Choose a level size that you and your
team can manage. If you make a level too small, it's not easy to enlarge it, but at
least you won't have the art team killing themselves to create all the content. If you
make a level too big and find that there isn't time to complete everything, you'll
have to either deliver a sparse, unfinished level or scramble to cut things out, which
will almost certainly harm your level's balance and pacing.
Avoid Conceptual Non Sequiturs
At the beginning of the first level of
James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies
, the player, in
the persona of James Bond, sneaks into an enemy military outpost armed only with
a pistol and faces numerous Russian guards; how many, he doesn't know. If he
blows up some of the oil drums scattered somewhat randomly outside the outpost,
he will find medical kits hidden inside, which he can use later to restore his health
when wounded.
Hiding medical kits inside oil drums belongs to a class of design errors, usually
made at the level design stage, called
conceptual non sequiturs
—game features that
make no sense. No sane person would think of looking in an oil drum to see if a
medical kit might be hidden within. Furthermore, any thinking player would rea-
son that if he's trying to sneak into an enemy military installation armed only with
a pistol, causing a loud explosion right outside is not a good idea; several dozen
people will come running to see what made the noise. He would further assume
that any medical kit that
was
inside an oil drum when it blew up wouldn't be good
for much afterward. Consequently, a reasonable player wouldn't blow up the oil
drum and wouldn't get the benefit of the medical kit. In other words, the game
punishes players for using their brains. It's simply poor design.
James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies
made the mistake of copying a 20-year-old car-
toon-game mechanic—resources hidden in odd places—into a realistic game. A
realistic game assumes that players can count on certain similarities between the
real world and the game world (oil drums store oil, not medical kits; explosions
destroy things rather than reveal things). No flight simulator bothers to explain
gravity, for the same reason. The player of a realistic game expects the assumptions
he makes in the real world to be valid in the game world. By violating these expec-
tations with a conceptual non sequitur,
James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies
became
considerably harder for all but an experienced gamer who already knew the con-
ventions of cartoon-style video games.
