#LEVEL DESIGN

[mostrovskaa]

Some more art from my bachelor's degree final art project - Urnfield. Here are a few sketches of individual levels and some visual dev ilustrations of them :-)

[samuraiunicorn]

The Broadcast Bazaar is a black market hidden amongst an old studio and the surrounding industrial sector. It won't be explorable for quite a while, but it will feature prominently in the opening cutscene of the public demo. There still a lot of details and NPCs that we need to add into the space, but things have been coming along quite smoothly this month, so I wanted to end the year on a bit of walk through.

More info to come in 2024.

[bynineb]

duck cave

[jam2go]

The new frontier of shopping: e-commerce

[devsgames]

Thinking about the design of The Imperial City from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion again. I love Oblivion but it's hands-down my least favourite design of any open world RPG because a lot of its layout defies a lot of what might ordinarily be logical city layout choices when building a city.

Disclaimer: This is mostly me being petty about level design that I recognize does not matter. I realize most of this is likely just due to development constraints and player-centric design choices, and can just as easily be written off. But dammit I'm a level designer who has worked on open world games and in the projects I worked on this is all stuff that would have been flagged so I'm gunna be petty anyway!

So let's talk about the paths into the city.

Well....it's the capital of all of Tamriel, it's on an island, and there's just one road leading in and out of it. That road leads over a bridge. Probably the easiest city to siege ever, just capture the bridge and you win. Ezpz.

But also the ROAD itself!!! My god!!!

Literally can you imagine all land-bound trade and transport having to navigate down this single 75 degree road to get in and out of the largest city (and capital!) of all of Tamriel. Horses, creatures notoriously good at navigating treacherous vertical inclines.

Madness!!!!!!

The harbour is also incredibly small for a capital. You'd think with one ski-hill road leading to the city they'd use the harbour more, but this thing fits two (2) ships max, and there's almost no room to navigate it them in there.

The logical layout would dictate that all goods in the city are stored in the harbour and transported into the city for sale, or brought to market from out of city. Well...

Both of those paths necessitate going to the exact opposite corner of the city in order to deliver the goods to where the trade district is! The absolute furthest possible route!

What's more is that these routes lead through multiple flights of stairs! Good luck driving that wagon full of produce to its destination!

Meanwhile if you trace a path leading from the the Harbour to the ocean you'll discover that the only river that leads to the ocean is shallow enough for a person to walk over, meaning sea liners can't pass through it.

So uh yeah... it's logistically impossible to sail a boat from the Imperial City (the capital of Tamriel) to the ocean around Tamriel and vice-versa, making the fact that it has a harbour at all makes little sense. No wonder there's only ever two ships docked there!

[rainworldmodding]

The Grinder

A region mod by @atomarium

Once you step into this labyrinth of metal and fire, there is no turning back. Survival is uncertain. Courage is mandatory. Featuring:

Moving and dangerous machinery

At least one lizard

130+ screens

Find this mod on the Steam Workshop!

[fantasiac]

seaside hill will be the first level in the Stagger engine!

I really like when water in Sonic is fun, so of course I want to mess around with water stuff asap, and seaside hill has always been my favourite stage because nostalgia, Heroes always my favorite (only) Sonic game as a kid, it's the best Generations level, the music is SO GOOD and it is a completely blank slate with lore, so I get to do some Sonic world building!! :D

also the inside of the temple is water palace from sonic rush, so I get to do some fun indoor level design like hydrocity has!! :D

[jofiah]

chat can someone tell me why I have spent so long remaking the Undead Burg from Dark Souls as a TF2 map. because i myself do not know

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy

I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.

Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.

I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.

I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)

I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.

But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.

So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.

This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.

Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.

But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.

There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.

And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).

I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.

[ellraiser]

designing the world of mudborne!

[jarkonian]

I've learned what active ragdolls are and how they work.

I will never make normal games again

[samuraiunicorn]

Heading down to the Broadcast Bazaar, I heard there's a Fancy Tech World with good deals on CRTs.

[bynineb]

the phone is ringing

[jam2go]

Let's go shopping!

[devsgames]

Designing Away From Fast Travel in Dragon's Dogma 2

New Youtube vid!

In this one I talk about Fast Travel as a mechanic in Open World games, and how Dragon's Dogma 2 found some interesting ways to make journeying an important part of the experience!