Devlog 3: Level Design or The Art of Player Agency

Hi my name is Callum and I'm the lead level designer for Full Tilt. In this devlog I'll talk a bit about my philosophy behind not only the level design of Full Tilt but also what lessons I learnt from my previous projects and how that knowledge and experience influenced this project.

Dan Taylor of Square Enix said in his 2018 GDC talk that a good level designer has to be well versed in narrative design, mechanic design, mission design, etc. He thought that we should take a holistic approach to the design of levels. Good levels should be smooth, easy to navigate and enjoyable to immerse yourself in. To do this we need to define a consistent visual language that guides the player through the path that you, as a designer, want them to navigate. 

Mirror's Edge did this VERY well by colouring areas you can climb and otherwise perform actions on in red, so the player can easily identify these areas at a glance and without having to think too hard about it. The challenge should be from the obstacles in the level, not trying to figure out where to go.

My philosophy in level design has always been to usher the player in the right direction without overtly stating a "correct" way to complete the level. You need to be good at predicting player behaviour and psychology which is something that only comes with experience and I won't pretend to be an expert. My previous level design experience was creating multiplayer maps for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) and Garry's Mod (Gmod), as well as a single player campaign for Amnesia: The Dark Descent (a screenshot of which I've attached bellow).

You can see here that the candle light guides the player up the stairs into the main room of the house they've found themselves in. Nowadays more than ever, players are sick of having their hand held when playing games. Players want to feel like they're exploring and discovering the level organically. This has been a particular challenge in Full Tilt.

This game is obviously a very linear experience, you go in one direction and navigate obstacles as fast as you can to reach the end of the level. I found that the most logical way to implement this kind of philosophy is to use light and scenery not to guide the player, but to keep them from becoming disoriented. I went and looked at some custom maps for CSGO called "Skill Surf" maps where you exploit a bug in the Source engine's physics to slide along a sloped surface and build tremendous speed. 

The concept of these maps goes back nearly a decade so the community has had a lot of time to mature and develop a set of unspoken rules, standards and conventions that other map makers follow when creating new maps for this game mode. You can see in the gif above how 7thmarchen the creator of this map, named surf_utopia, used level geometry, colour and the established nature of surf players, like how some players like to strafe to the right off a ramp while others strafe left, so you have to account for both, to create a very easy to navigate, but difficult to complete level. 

Below you can see how we've used lighting to show the player where to go. They should be able to see that light at the end of the hall and know they they need to head around the corner as the next obstacle.

We, as a team took a lot of inspiration from how these levels play in the design of not just our levels but also our game's mechanics. Mid air movement like strafing doesn't work as well in Unity as it does in Source, but with the grapple hook, you can achieve the same style of movement via different means.

You can see in the image at the top of this post that in the level concept art, I added orange posts to not just give the player something to grapple to, but also to show them where they can or should go to complete the level, while still attempting to maintain that careful balance of freedom and direction. The last thing we want to do is have big arrows or waypoints showing you where to go, I think that sucks the fun out of playing a video game.

So to conclude, level design is a balancing act of creating an immersive, interesting experience whilst also being easy to navigate without being too obvious. It's a style of design that hasn't really existed before video games were invented, particularly 3D engines for video games, since that adds literally another dimension of exploration for the player.  The perfect level to me (in linear games at least), is one that you don't need to study and meticulously search for a path to navigate, but one where the path is revealed naturally the player so that they just know where to go instinctually, to me, that is what keeps video games a fun and enjoyable experience without becoming a chore.