Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
DESIGNING LEVELS
Level design is the process of constructing the experience that the game offers
directly to the player, using the components provided by the game design: the
characters, challenges, actions, game world, core mechanics, and storyline if there
is one. These components don't have to be completely finished in order for level
design to begin, but enough must be in place for a level designer to have something
to work with. In the early part of the elaboration stage, the level designers work to
create a typical
first playable
level. This level should not be the first one that the
player
encounters because the first level in the game is atypical as the player is still
learning to play the game. Rather, it's called
first playable
because it's the first one
the level designers create.
Creating a working first playable level is an important milestone in the develop-
ment of a game because it means that testers can begin testing it. See Chapter 12,
“General Principles of Level Design,” for an overview of the level design process.
WRITING THE STORY
Small video games seldom bother with a story, but large ones usually include a
story of some kind. Stories help to keep the player interested and involved. They
give her a reason to go on to the next level, to see what happens next. A story
may be integrated with the gameplay in a number of different ways. Your story
may occur within the levels as the player plays or it may simply be a transition
mechanism between the levels—a reward for completing a level. The story may
be embedded, with prewritten narrative chunks, or emergent, arising out of the
core mechanics. It may be linear and independent of the player's actions, or it
may go in different directions based on the player's choices. Chapter 7 addresses
all these issues in detail. However you choose to do it, you define the story during
the elaboration stage, usually in close conjunction with level design.
BUILD, TEST, AND ITERATE
The great game designer Mark Cerny (
Spyro the Dragon, Jak and Daxter
) asserts that
during the preproduction process of development, you should build, test, and then
throw away no less than four different prototypes of your game. This may be
extreme, but the underlying principle is correct. Video games must be prototyped
before they can be built for real, and they must be tested at every step along the
way. Each new idea must be constructed and tried out, preferably in a quick-and-
dirty fashion first, before it is incorporated into the completed product. Cerny also
argues that none of the materials you create for prototyping should ever find their
way into the final product—or at least, that you should never count on it. By hav-
ing a firm rule to this effect, you free your programmers and artists to work quickly
to build the test bed, secure in the knowledge that they won't have to debug it later.
If they're trying to build maintainable code or final-quality artwork during the pre-
production stage of development, the testing process takes far longer than it
should.
NOTE
Plan to throw
away all sound, art,
and code created for
a prototype. That way
your artists, audio
people, and program-
mers can work quickly
without worrying about
having to debug their
content later. Trying
to build production-
quality assets during
preproduction just
slows the process down.
