Community Level Design for Competitive Counter-Strike:GO

alright hello everybody today we're gonna be talking about emphasizing player skill and strategic choices in csgo level design work community level designers for counter-strike we have five levels that ship with the valve csgo here are some pictures I'm actually a professional player or it was and here's some pictures of me competing and some of Sean's maps that he's worked on so I'm Sal Garza you might know me as volcano if you were involved in the Counter Strike world at all I have over a decade of experience as an eSports pro gamer as well as community level design work as well and this is Sean Sean snowing he's got over a decade of experience making levels for all sorts of games so the first thing I want to talk about is building levels to last and the main thing that that deals with is letting player skill shine through via strategic depth so how many of you here are familiar with or have played counter-strike before all right so basically everybody so I'll keep it pretty brief on this so CS is a first-person shooter it's a round based game each round is a minute and 45 seconds long and counter-terrorists or cts play as defense they have to defend the bomb site terrorists or T's are the offense they have to plant the bomb make sure that it explodes that's how they win the round so there's a distinct strategy for both teams each round so defense they have setups they have pushes they have all that and terrorists have to worry about coordinating attacks breaching bomb sites faking attacks and things like that and it's the most popular PC based fps and eSports right now and a large part of that is due to community involvement whether it be through level design players competing in online leagues people hosting land tournaments and everybody attending them sponsors everything like that a large part of the success is due to the community so what is cache cache is a map that Sean and I created this is an overview of it it's a very successful third-party map so it has about 12,000 or so hours logged each day of gameplay probably more now since that's an old stat and the game is growing pretty consistently so when you see this on the left that's the Counter Terrorist spawn point and on the right is where the terrorist spawn so it's a standard three Lane layout the middle is probably where the most action takes place and then you have a bomb site bomb set a on the top bomb site B on the bottom each of them have about two or three choke points entrance so if you see this there's I like to think of a central dividing line of battle like a line of scrimmage almost on the map I think a lot of the successful maps do have this because it's a five-on-five game so you have five terrorists and five counter terrorists if you have too many choke points it's too much to defend the gameplay just gets very chaotic and it's less strategic even though you might think it would be more because there's more options but each option matters a lot less if there's too many of them so I found four choke points for central choke point is about the right number you could probably make three work five could probably work too I mean you can if you know what you're doing you could probably get it to work so the way it's important to know how Counter Strike is played on the professional level terrorists will set up into what's called the default strategy so since there's five of them they might have one guy watching be one or two guys dedicated to the middle and then another two dedicated to a and what they do is hold four pushes since the counter-terrorist can also play dynamically as well they can push and gain ground once they do that they know that attack is not coming to that bomb site and they can rotate defenders so it's important for terrorists to start out in a static defense and prevent ct's from doing that that's important for level design as I said because if there's too many areas then you can't meaningfully watch all of them and counter-strike is a very punishing game so if you're caught looking the wrong way you're as good as dead basically the time to kill is very short so you can die in one bullet from almost any gun in the game if it hits you in the head so to many areas of danger at once is a bad thing you want to be able to divide and conquer and what I mean by that is if you're being exposed to a choke point you only want one or two spots that you have to worry about before you can move on to the next section so you kind of sweep from right to left if you were coming out and to be able to do that and clear each spot individually is very important so this is an overview of bomb site a on de cache you see there's only five there's a little bit more but there's about five common spots so this isn't doesn't sound like much but it actually is because when you see where there's line-of-sight overlaps so those are called cross fires and any word where there's an overlap in line you're gonna be put in a difficult spot as an attacker because you're gonna have to check more locations than you can possibly do at once and as I said it's a punishing game so if you're looking the wrong way you're gonna die most times at least so five or so common point it's probably about enough what I see a lot of new level designers doing in counter-strike is putting cover almost everywhere and you know it makes sense you you would think that having a lot of cover is a good thing but it's actually probably worse to have too much cover than too little in counter-strike the next thing I want to talk about is verticality in counter-strike because as level designers we always hear how important it is to make sure you have a lot of verticality in your levels it creates more dynamic gameplay but going back to what I said before since CS is so punishing even just a little bit of verticality goes a long way and the other thing to know is in counter-strike people use extremely low sensitivities I didn't bring my mouse pad with me today but it's probably about the width of this podium and I use the whole thing when I'm playing counter-strike that's how low people use their mouse sensitivity so it's even more exaggerated in this game if somebody's looking the wrong way they have almost no chance of winning the fight because they're so focused on precision that it's difficult to do 180s very quickly but CS does allow verticality to be used in interesting ways that not a lot of other games do have so one of these ways is stacking and boosting so what stacking is is you can actually get on top of your teammates head and you can do that either you can just stand there and then there's two people with their guns in the same line of sight or you can actually use their head as an intermediate platform to get on an even higher location and not only that you can actually look over so on cache we have a container people can stack behind it and actually look over the container in a location you wouldn't expect somebody to be able to see over and I think stacking and boosting is really cool and good for CS because it does encourage planning and teamwork you have to be on the same page with your teammate you have to coordinate at the start of the round to pull it off because if you're late you're just gonna be two sitting ducks out in the middle of the open free kills for your enemies and here's an old old picture of boosting at 1.5 it doesn't exist and csgo anymore which is probably a good thing because you can probably do a lot of exploit exploits and things like that but this is kind of the legacy of it so now in csgo you can actually only do it with one other person and something to illustrate what I'm talking about with all of these things I've talked about with how CS is punishing and how verticality is very powerful is there's a member of cloud 9 called shroud and at a LAN tournament pretty recently he was in a situation where his team was losing by one round and if they won that round they'd go to overtime and all he had was a pistol so let's take a look and see what he did oops dropsy but I think he thinks he's in the spot that they don't know about so he's sticking there hoping that they push through this book but they're alternating no they're coming back I by power cannot afford to make the same mistake they made earlier in the game 25 seconds left if the clock runs out on them and they give up overtime it will be the heartbreak of a generation molotovs in set peace out shroud has let them all pass oh my god huge play right there so that kind of goes over everything I've said so far all it is is a guy with the pistol in an insanely tense situation thousands of dollars on the line and it's just one box that he's on he's not on like the top of a building in a sniper tower and he kills three people in what feels like one or two seconds so yeah CS is a very punishing game and you need to keep that in mind if you're a level designer and not put too much verticality around the level and just be very mindful of all of those elements and how they play out and see us the next thing I want to speak about is trick jumps because this is something that CS does pretty well so what a trick jump is is it's a way to manipulate your movement in midair to gain extra distance on a jump and this allows players to showcase mechanical skill because you do have to practice this you can't just jump in the game and expect to make a trick jump it takes hours of practice to get it right and it's really interesting because it lets players express themselves in a way that's not just twitch reflexes and raw motor skill with aiming and positions and stuff like that it shouldn't be too powerful or exclusive so what I mean is don't have a trick jump that gives you insane amounts of power or there's no way to achieve the same effect without doing a trick jump so in cash we have a trick jump which I'll show you in just a second but you can do it with the teammate a teammate can just boost you and you'd have the same access it's not something that you need to do that's most effective in moderation so you shouldn't have ten trick jumps on your map maybe one two three would be the max I would say one or two is probably a good amount so on cash you can see where it says 1 that's where you start so you run along that garage overhang and then it requires a trick jump onto an AC hanging on the wall there as the second step and a second trick jump from 2 to 3 so it's very difficult to pull off but if you do it right it actually lets you flank the enemy team oh you can go over that roof and get behind enemy lines which is really useful but it's extremely dangerous and it's noisy too since you're running on metal surfaces the next way to add some strategic depth to your maps is through wall banging which it's just a name that the cs community came up with it's kind of silly but all it means is shooting through walls and this is another way to allow players to showcase their creativity so basically it just it uses the rifle or pistols ammo as a way to determine if a bullet should go through a surface and this is really useful and we use it here on crown the reason it's useful is because it gives players another way to clear a spot without having to get actually behind it and check it themselves with their eyes they can shoot a few bullets into it if somebody dies they know it's clear and if nobody dies they know it's clear as well so we baked it into crown here with these with this doorway it's a very powerful spot to camp behind but you do notice there's two little boxes on either side of the door and we made that a wooden material which bullets can penetrate and you can clear both sides of the door without actually having to go through it the downside is you make a lot of noise you're using bullets you're letting the enemy know where you are but like I said it's another element that players have in their toolbox they don't have to do that but they can do it the bomb planting zones are another very important I mean it's the main objective of CS and a lot of people don't really consider the implications of manipulating the bomb zones so a lot of extra thought here it can go a long way it's the more exposed to bomb plan is the more difficult it is to actually plant but that means you can cover it from more locations as well so let's take a look here at cache so the default bomb plant spot is tucked in between the red box and the missile crate so it's just extreme safe almost nobody dies there when they're planting because you can't be seen from anywhere but the downside to that is if the defender is actually defusing the bomb you have to run very very far out from where your cover is and it puts you in a really bad spot so you're trading convenience earlier on for difficulty later on the next spot here if you plant it just a little bit more to the left actually gives you a great place to cover it from the main location that terrorists attack from it's just a lot more difficult to plant there so you can see the trade-off clearly and then the most extreme example is on this side which is exposed directly to where counter terrorists rotate in from so it's very difficult to pull off what you see team is doing is throwing smoke grenades there and just blindly running in their smokes and planting but it does give you the best spot to cover the bomb from you can cover it from almost anywhere on the map so that's it for from my part of the talk so just to tie things up this stuff is very specific to counter-strike but you can use it in any game you just have to make sure you have a good understanding of the mechanics of your game and how your players are actually using the product and listen to their feedback so it's really important Lou all right hi so I just if I may I'd like to introduce myself my name is Shawn I'm a level designer and environment artist with over 10 years of experience making levels for games and I had the honor and the privilege of working with Sal and I really view it that way because you know Sal is very much a legend in the counter-strike scene you know he's been playing the game since it was basically released and playing at the highest levels and making maps for the game so I can't even begin to tell you everything I learned from that collaboration and it was really meaningful to me so what it taught me is among other things that every level design decision matters to the pros you know in Counter Strike rewarding players skill has to be a top priority every aesthetic decision is in some way a design decision and therefore in csgo the line between art direction and level design becomes very heavily blurred so I'd like to talk to you about a specific example from cache the level we worked on sort of the compromise process that Sal and I went through I had a vision in art direction that the map would take place in Chernobyl and sort of the surrounding areas of Chernobyl so this is sort of the initial direction that I came up with for the level but Sal took a little bit of an issue with it and he sort of educated me on the fact that you know and gave me some perspective in the sense that you know these players are playing these maps day-in day-out as you know cash we mentioned like 12,000 hours a day logged on this level so you know he felt it was really important that players not these you know players are just like anybody else they want to be happy you know they don't want to be bogged down with you know too much of a depressing gloomy environment and so you know he really helped me modulate the art direction for this level and we got to something a little bit maybe if it's not totally cheerful it's at least a little bit less bleak and a little bit more neutral in tone of it and I believe it was a much better result than the one that I just as a level designer who wasn't considering Pro feedback would have gotten to without his help so I'd like to talk a little bit about readability and you know obviously a little bit of a definition here so readability of the ability to easily distinguish players against the background in this case the environment of a map and this is sort of a related concept you know in tf2 there's nine classes in each class is distinct so valve as you know as I've read they sort of in designing these characters wanted to make sure that each silhouette would be unique and identifiable so that players would be able to make snap judgments based on the silhouettes that they were able to identify against the background and so that really goes to show like the importance of being able to identify players in a rapid manner and in counterstrike it's even more important because if you can't see your opponent it's like wa Sal talked about you can die very quickly and so those split seconds are critical and pro players are very needed very mindful and they have very high expectations Asians on the design side of what those things end up looking like and it just goes back to this concept of Counter Strike as an eSport so there are many hidden perks to creating readable environments readable environments improve the player experience and improving player experience really has to be a holistic endeavor you know you readable levels enhance the player experiences by reducing that psychological principle of cognitive dissonance where players might not be able to articulate exactly why they don't like a level but they don't like a level and they know they don't and as level designers we have to study that and understand why and try and avoid that and it relates back to the concept as of players as competitors you know when players in counter-strike they don't really they don't even play maps that's maybe a key thing to point out is they don't play maps they practice maps because they're they're thinking already about CompTIA but about competition and competing with one another so instead of fighting other players and the level a well-designed level can fade into the background and allow player interactions to come to the forefront which is really what players prefer in the first place so who here has played dust - okay that sounds about right so does - is really the top dog in counter-strike it's really the default level of a game which is you know for a shooter game it's almost unusual so some facts about dust - it's easily the most played map and counter-strike history it's an excellent map by any means it's got a memorable theme it's got a clean and highly readable presentation it's you know got a flawless layout time-tested it is by all means the counter-strike map so one of the one of the keys to dust 2's enduring successes is its simplicity and its minimalism here you can see dust ooze middle it's you know very straightforward and you know easy to digest and so that really you know harkens back for for me what I consider the wisdom and minimization you know when you have the extremely simple digestible geometry when you have these saturated textures which trend towards white when you have contrast which is heightened towards path exits and minimal elsewhere that really aids in player navigation without getting in the way of the level and it really makes it extremely challenging for other levels to compete when I'm designing levels I have to compete against us too and this sort of you know this Pantheon this classic map so why is the Stu such a classic it merges elegantly merges form with function it accepts the premise that players crave interaction with other players as their paramount concern and it merges player demands for readability and fantasy by creating an effective and believable environment and for me this is really the take away this is the process that I've come to working with Sal working on counter-strike specifically this concept of improving readability how it allows for a reduction in cognitive dissonance which creates positive association with players and demonstrates high value to players and the way that dust2 demonstrates high value to players that improves player retention and it can have the consequence of making your level more popular than the rest so at the end of the day is there any room to compete with dust2 it's difficult you have to merge form with function as effectively as the stood us you have to somehow create even higher levels of player evaluation but how for me it's been about by focusing on the room for improvement so minimalism all of the Stu can be weakness I mean the Stu is a very effective level it's ruthlessly effective but as an artist I don't know that I personally consider dust to be that aesthetic of a level it's very effective maybe realistic but I don't find it to be particularly aesthetic so for me on a project I worked on called season I really wanted minimalism to be the strength if you look at a game like Deus Ex or Mirror's Edge the minimalism there is really one of the key strengths of that aesthetic and I believe sort of taking a page out of that book I was able to get to a more effective result so for me this is the holy grail for csgo level designers it's an aesthetic blend of form with function purity of experience which goes back to readable with a clear artistic vision but there is a problem totally readable or somewhat D saturated environments feel false or fake or artificial or they're not real they don't seem real for me the solution was to go back to the idea of merging form with function so this is a screenshot of seasons a bomb site and it accepts that sort of artificiality and it goes towards the laboratory theme and we see areas like this in our lives maybe not this extreme or stylized but you know clean environments so for me aesthetic minimalism really embodies the goal you see it in games like Team Fortress 2 you see it in games like Deus Ex this is this idea of aesthetic minimalism so there are other affective there are other advantages of affective aesthetic design and that is that details are free to be details but they're also free to be more than just details so skyboxes are not just decoration anymore they're design here you can see on season an example of the radio tower in the background there and Mount Fuji now this is accomplishing a lot of different things all at once in counter-strike smoke grenades flash grenades molotovs these these are really critical gameplay components that any pro will tell you about I'll start wrapping it up here so anyways basically you can line up grenades using this Tower and it relates back to the theme of the level and it relates to the gameplay element so effective sky boxes evoke design truths they're out of the way they've magnified by readability they aid in the fiction they enhance gameplay features like grenades and csgo truly does present entirely new opportunities for excellent skybox design here's the skybox on cache you can see it relates back to Chernobyl on season Fuji which you know there's obviously this level takes place in Japan overpass which is a valve level they have the berlin TV tower again that's communicating the theme it's also critical for gameplay and I'll demonstrate why here you can see tying back to the idea when form meets function players see value and that is an example of somebody lining up a smoke grenade using me radio tower and overpass so thank you very much and this is how you can contact us

Channel: GDC

Views: 10,884

Rating: 4.92278 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: Y5RZP52jYy4

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/allouticey]

they're not really confident public speakers, but the content is good and they know what they're talking about. found the video to be interesting.