Level Design Tips and Tricks
A selection of tips and tricks for Level Design development.
A compilation of ten tips for designing game levels, clearly explained and with illustrative example screenshots.
Links to articles or videos made by other fine folks that we found interesting.
A selection of tips and tricks for Level Design development.
A compilation of ten tips for designing game levels, clearly explained and with illustrative example screenshots.
Organised by our Educational Partner, Norwich University of the Arts, Stuart Ashen joined us at the Gaming Festival in 2017 to talk about Hareraiser and expl...
In this 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival talk, Stuart Ashen tells the amazing story of Hareraiser, a 1984 computer game (of sorts). I wasn’t expecting much based on the hyperbolic video title, but the events surrounding this game are actually layered with intrigue and Ashen’s expert storytelling makes the thirty-six minutes fly by. In the end, I am persuaded - Hareraiser is quite possibly the worst game ever published and sold, but not for any of the reasons you likely expect.
In this 2018 GDC session, developer Zach Gage explains how to make games desirable to someone looking over a player's shoulder on the subway, sitting next to...
Zach Gage takes a look at how to make games so readable that someone looking over your shoulder on the subway as you play on your phone can tell what’s going on and get excited to download the game themselves. The key is the principle of The Three Reads, an approach which ensures that useful information is prominent at the right time and in the right order - first the core of the experience that draws people in, then the key details that convey the high-level rules, then the contextual information that conveys less-central rules.
Honestly, I had such low expectations for this, but it completely blew me away. It's such an amazing experience, and its greatness is only unveiled through c...
While I haven’t yet played Detroit: Become Human myself, I’m always excited when someone talks sense about David Cage. Here, Skill Up takes a fair look at Quantic Dream’s latest, acknowledging its flaws but illuminating how it’s the most successful realization yet of Cage’s vision for what games can be.
868-Hack solves the problem of clumsy difficulty options by putting the player directly in control of the difficulty themselves.
Tom Francis looks at player-driven risk/reward tradeoffs (which he calls “betting on yourself”) in roguelike 868-HACK, explaining their advantages over traditional difficulty modes and designer-driven difficulty spikes.
One way that game developers can limit player options is by implementing one-way, irreversible events.
One of my golden rules of game design is “Never punish the player for exploring.” Bart Stewart takes a look at one way this happens with what he terms “irreversible events” in RPGs. He mostly doesn’t like them, and neither do I.
The Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter raised $2.8 million from over 19,000 backers in May. Last month, the subsequent re-release of Myst…
A retrospective on the discourse around Myst as a case study on the weird and inaccurate ways we discuss and recall gaming culture. For me, the main takeaway is that gaming has always had more subcultures than the social narrative has accounted for and when we refer to gaming as a monolith we distort reality by ignoring the experience and perspective of many, many people.
At Develop:Brighton, Creative Assembly's Grace Carroll said the "visible presence of moderation" was enough to turn around a toxic Steam forum in just a week
Creative Assembly’s lead social media manager Grace Carroll provides some lessons learned on community management. To me, the key takeaway is that the biggest difference is made just by showing up - making it clear that the community is being heard and that there are consequences for toxic behavior.
Slay the Spire lets you stack abilities and buffs without fiddly maths, and it feels good.
Tom Francis takes a look at Slay the Spire, pointing out that because it’s a roguelike and individual games don’t last that long, bonuses and abilities can safely make huge differences rather than tiny incremental ones. The results are a lot easier for players to conceptualize and can make things much more fun. (And as Shamus Young has pointed out there are implications for QA as well.)
It's easy to give your players too much choice. This post discusses the literature on excess choice and its relevance to designing choices in games. Crucially, evidence suggests that choice overload is most likely to damage the experience of new players.
A quick look at what the research says about how to avoid overwhelming players with too many options and turning them off of mechanics or entire games. See also Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice and there’s room for more analysis on option categorization and its relationship to chunking or the way it turns one overwhelming decision into a short series of manageable ones.