'Real World Level Design' & 'Playgrounds and Level Design'

[Music] all right so we're talking about playgrounds and level design applying playgrounds uh briefly about me my background's in modding which will be relevant later and i also work as a multi-player level designer including these games and some others but we're here to talk about playgrounds real world playgrounds and what they can teach us about level design specifically what they can teach us about level geometry before we get too far into details let's get academic playgrounds are persistent community spaces for non-prescriptive play playgrounds are not an obstacle course to beat or puzzle to solve or a story to tell there are aspects of obstacle courses and stories to playgrounds but playgrounds are not consumed through interaction they persist a good playground facilitates many stories many obstacle courses and many forms of play playgrounds are also fundamentally multiplayer spaces and they scale according to player need that means player count game mode and i'm blaking on third one player trust the next slide of course uh so raph kostner team with google explored the idea of a trust spectrum in games and a similar idea also applies to playgrounds here we can scale up from solo and parallel play to cooperative activities and upward to large group competitive and cooperative activities there's also some overlap between the idea of playgrounds and sandboxes often we talk about sandbox level design the main difference is that sandboxes you it's kind of a neutral space where you bring toys playgrounds are the toy itself sandboxes are also often consumed through interaction while playgrounds persist sandbox is often really good at parallel play and solo play but they don't offer the most rich cooperative or competitive experiences the the core of this talk is about level geometry but keep in mind that the way we build our levels and the way we shape our levels affects multiplayer systems if we played deathmatch on the king of the hill map it would still probably feel like king of the hill because level design and game systems work together so here's a playground for my neighborhood it's pretty basic pretty simple if you live in north america you've probably seen playgrounds like this all over the place and the important thing here is we can't convert this layout directly to our video game levels and we also probably wouldn't want to but there is still something we can learn from it so here's the same playground up close let's break it down as the fundamental unit we have a module or a self-contained chunk at the heart of this module is a platform elevated up this serves as a kind of goal keep in mind this playground is for young kids for me staying on that platform is not a meaningful vantage point but for a five-year-old you know it is in order to get up to that platform our goal there's a skill check the player must pass a route up in this case a staircase the important thing to keep in mind is that the skill check is not a binary pass or fail you can fail trip and hurt yourself but most use will depend and fall into a range of skill for a three-year-old you'll be pretty slow on those stairs for five-year-old okay for ten-year-old maybe you can go two steps at a time and if you keep the multiplayer context in mind if i can take those stairs two steps at a time and my opponent can't now i've got tactics i can exploit now that we've reached the platform we have routes back down and these function as rewards in this case slides these are also opportunities for subversive play for the skillful player who can run up the slide subversive play is basically whenever a constraint of the design can be used against its intent or when the player thinks they're doing something against intent whether or not it actually was hard to see but there's also a set piece in the back this is a little steering wheel a good set piece helps for landmarking and theming a module cool so now that we have this language of modules we can build into more complex structures so this playground's a little more interesting because here we have several modules that combine into a larger structure as our first module we have a staircase going around the right we've got a rock wall that we're seeing the back of and we've got some slides this connects to a second module with this sort of twisted ladder pole thing this goes up to a third module with a twisty tube slide a long slide a ladder going down the interior in a big rock wall and that ladder connects to our fourth module with a small staircase some monkey bars and a little jump up stump and that takes us back to the ground in the abstract if we rearrange this we see this formula is a hierarchy or trees as a playground it's pretty cool but it's also still pretty simple if we played a game of tag here the lack of loops would be a problem we'd reach one end of the structure and the only way to go back to the other end would be to run around on the ground or backtrack but now that we have this abstract language it's pretty easy to imagine a version that connects as cycles in fact now with the subject language we can imagine infinite sprawling huge playgrounds if we so wanted so how do we convert this to level geometry and level design here's where we get to modding so most of my experiments have been for quake the one from 1996. and for those of you who don't know that's a screenshot of the first level in quake um when applying playgrounds the really important thing is that we have a robust skill set to draw on that we can apply and quake has that quake also has advanced skill checks for its movement systems which we'll get to in a little bit there's also an active player community which means there's a lot of feedback that we can get the maps are also fundamentally multiplayer in that they support solo cooperative and pvp on all maps once we adjust the layouts to be more in the playground format we have something as much closer to the playgrounds i've described than many other games that exist so taking those ideas together here's a basic playground again if you played quake if you looked at the other screenshot this looks nothing like a normal quake level but this is a quake level and once we overlay and break it back down into the ideas of modules and the skills involved this should look familiar by now rearrange and if we swapped out those skills the same hierarchy and loops could describe a playground pushing these ideas further adding monsters and items for more rewards and skill checks and we get some pretty neat playgrounds importantly once we add enemy respawning and item respawning persistence this level becomes a place to be rather than an obstacle course to complete like most quake levels importantly while there are objectives to complete there are many ways to achieve them and many ways of adding new goals and new ways of playing so the player got a ring of shadows which means the monsters aren't seeing them normally the ring of shadows only lasts about 30 seconds which wouldn't be enough to beat the level but this player is also doing crazy stuff so [Music] all right there you go uh speed run normally that map takes about 10 to 15 minutes for first playthrough to go through but in the speed run using the advanced skill checks of uh rocket jumping circle jumping ramp jumping a player is able to beat it in 27 seconds and that's not something i planned but it's something that's possible within this playground format and it's a way of adding new goals and new ways of playing on top of the experience that are separate from what would traditionally be a standard obstacle course at this point some of you may be thinking but andrew i'm not making that kind of game how does this help me and the reality is that probably you aren't making this kind of game because this is a very strange thing i'm exploring but if you are working in 3d environments and you have player avatars and you're worried about camera character and controls then you can still apply playgrounds if you're involved in prototyping or early pre-production you need metrics test maps the standard metrics test map is basically just a 3d equivalent of meter stick tells you how far how fast how high and so on but it doesn't tell you whether your metrics are fun so metrics playgrounds here's an example of metrics playground i built for a game where we want to get the fundamentals right very early on we had a lot of fundamental rich moves set that we want to explore we had a tight third person camera we had double jumping clambering crouching sliding sprinting all sorts of things we wanted to make sure that all those things worked cohesively and none of those none of those abilities stood out as sore thumbs as we started adding more gameplay mechanics and discovering what our game was we dropped them into the level as well we had gun plays there were things to shoot at and things that shot at you and this was a way to sample the entire experience of the game in one spot would our final levels look anything like playgrounds probably not and that's okay the value of playgrounds here was to help us identify the fun of the game rather than worrying about the level level design just yet returning to our idea of playgrounds i've really only scratched the surface with my example so far really we've gotten at the non-prescriptive aspect through our approach to level geometry but there's a lot more work to be done around the persistent community spaces as well to me playgrounds are an interesting metaphor for what we can do with level design around multiplayer it's an example of how level geometry affects system design and it's a way for level geometry to allow multiplayer to be more flexible to our player's needs thanks let me see if i can get that youtube video to play nope uh if you have questions you can come up to the mic if you don't that's all right as well hello i was just wondering if you had any examples of games that kind of have similar structures uh because one example that i was thinking of when you were showing your final example was apex legends uh has one level it's like water treatment like that whole area looks very similar to the map that you showed in one of your last slides yeah i haven't played apex legends yet but i feel like battle royales are one of the cases that's exploring it um more of a playground approach and it's very exciting for me to see that i think they are still pretty rigid in some ways they're more flexible than traditional pvp experiences but um there is uh more flexibility around like i play pubg as a road trip sim i don't play it to win um and the fact that it lets me do that without ruining somebody else's experience is amazing like that's unheard of like 10 years ago so it's exciting does that answer your question i was curious if you had any other examples oh um [Music] 64th co-op is pretty cool um there's a speed run of uh mario 64 with co-op i think hacked in that's just amazing um but it's another case where the level is kind of consumed through interactions so it's still not 100 thanks hi um do you think that this playground concept is something that is in any way applicable in a two-dimensional environment i haven't done much 2d level design so off the top my head i don't know i feel like you could take something like spelunky um uh were you here for the previous talk that okay um so radically non-linear level design as uh audrey's talk um or aubry um okay aubry um and yeah i feel like a contained arena almost pac-man like probably would let you do some interesting things there thank you okay uh what kind of concerns do you have for making sure that the parts of the playground like feel attached rather than just like independent parts who just happen to be put next to each other um well it's specifically that they build up into a hierarchy a lot of this is that there's gravity at play and that you can fall back down and to get to the higher points you have to take a route up um and that naturally creates connectivity between these nodes um i'm not sure that answers your question though um no that's fine it's just like something feels like like separate puzzles are just happen to be put together and there's like what kind of thought is put into making sure they feel fine as a whole rather than independently a lot of us just play testing a lot um because if it's too far of an outlier then nobody's playing it nobody's using it and it's all right hi there awesome talk um with regards to this like one of the things you had mentioned was sort of like you have the set pieces and stuff with regards to actual playgrounds and we've got like these sort of with your play test examples sort of the different elements that sort of make up your level but when we're getting more along in pipelines for level production we start to add more uh geometric features we start to add more things that draw the eye more how do we like if we were going to theoretically make games that sort of center around these kind of node-based ideas how do we try and preserve that node base like keeping the focus while adding our geometric on top of that i don't think it inherently has to be as geometric as i've done here a lot of that's for the sake of fast iterations and again helping players realize this isn't standard quake don't expect standard quake gameplay um you could do and i have done experiments that are uh much more traditionally pretty and less uh lego blocks the specifics of solving for like a high fidelity environment um uh it's going to be case by case thank you uh do we need to switch to jerry or do we still have time um i'm not sure what time is it we started i think you have a couple more minutes okay um who's next you can go first okay thanks um hi um so you mentioned that uh playgrounds are where you bring toys and sandboxes is the toy itself yep do you find that there's any room for overlap between the two or in the case like is there any examples that you can think of yeah yeah i feel like um often the term sandbox has been used um to mean playgrounds in some cases like um uh i'm thinking bungee games in particular like sanebox designers around weapons in the halo series to me that's almost more playground design than it is uh sandbox design because it's not um i don't know there's some fuzziness in the terms there and there's definitely some overlap i think the main thing is how persistent the space is thank you hey uh so talking about how you use playgrounds as a form of establishing your metrics do you uh do you consider this to be the most important part of this uh playground technique or that it sort of like spreads out throughout the entire design of it so like for example you said earlier that you create a playground to establish your metrics does that sort of design element showcase itself as good as it seemed uh with the metric uh establishment that you had showed earlier when you say showed earlier do you mean the so like that that image where you had showed that playground that you built um yeah this one yeah so do uh does this sort of uh playground establishment uh translate better for establishing metrics or just in general design or does it sort of in your opinion spread out basically evenly all over the place um like for me this doesn't replace other metrics test maps because you do still want to verify hey does my code actually work am i actually jumping five feet that kind of thing um i feel like though uh the context that's provided by this kind of a fun experimental play space is um very valuable in determining whether you're um whether it's actually fun um definitely problem i've run into in the past the only metrics test map we had before this was a big open flat box and as a result everybody was running really fast and jumping really high and like attack abilities were like going miles and obviously because if you don't have context around you you can't tell how fast you're moving and as soon as we did this it's like oh whoa slow down so hopefully that answers your question yeah thank you very much hi everybody um good afternoon it's great to be here i'm jerry bellick i am a professor of game design at miami university in oxford ohio uh it still doesn't make any sense to me but that's just the way it is uh i and i'm a play engineer um so a lot of what i do is designing uh physical uh hardware electronic digital experiences so uh kind of running the gamut uh if you've ever been to alt control gdc for example uh that's something i've been involved with uh for quite a few years um and this is real world level design sort of uh it's going to be a bit of a bait and switch so that's that's fun this is probably a little more accurate to it so what we're really going to talk about is a few lenses that i use to look at designing in spaces and how that connects to digital worlds real worlds where the similarities are where the differences are and specifically looking at the boundaries of designed experience and the experience bleed so this is something i use with a lot of the work that i build but two big inspirations for me that i'm sure you're all very familiar with are disney and nintendo two masters of design so disney has always been kind of at the forefront of immersive and experienced design way before they were buzz words and nintendo i think is a really major innovator in games breath of the wild especially i think is really impressive with how unique and thoughtful the open world design was and i think there's some really interesting similarities between them you may recognize some of these images as supplemental to nintendo presentation on the breath of the wild world design and what i see are concepts very similar to how theme parks have approached large scale layouts especially the idea of attraction or magnetism to lane landmarks and the use of obstructions to block or control the reveal of something called a berm in theme park design so if you look at the attracting elements in this view you can see that the positioning the scale and the density of the landmarks all affect how they attract us without confining us or creating a golden path the large landmarks help determine where additional points of interest can be placed or if you're at disney where you would put a churro stand so here's a picture at magic kingdom and you can see how similar that is to that screenshot in breath of the wild once again it's this very deliberate use of position elevation scale and density that's going to attract us in different directions now there's no wrong path here there's just your path and you can examine this at any scale from any position whether you're at disney or you're running around a game like breath of the wild imagine gravitational fields of varying sizes pulling people to and fro as they wander around this park cinderella's castle perhaps being the strongest pull taking people in a wide arc as they move around during the day so this is kind of a modern definition pertaining to designed entertainment also applies to like hollywood sets but a berm even at disney isn't always about blocking things but it's also about controlling your view which i think is a really important similarity to breath of the wild where they use what they call the triangle rule as a way of hiding landmarks like a berm but then revealing and in fact the reveal of cinderella's castle when entering the park was really really important to walt when you get to the train station at magic kingdom that was actually built as a berm to control the reveal similar to the breath of the wild's triangle rule so when you get up there you can't see anything inside the park and then you go to the left or the right through a tunnel and then you come upon main street and finally cinderella's castle is revealed perfectly framed within that space now all of that is happening within the gates of the park it is the boundary of the disney experience and everything beyond that boundary is completely under their control um much like in digital games so the boundary in this context is what allows them to then create that build up and that reveal to crescendo to very powerful moments but it's not actually where the audience experiences beginning for the experience bleed that's everything for disney leading up to those gates disney influences that experience bleed through their mobile app their airport shuttle their automatic luggage transfer and a hundred other ways so that the closer you get to disney the more magical it feels and the more things are just kind of happening for you so i think it's really useful to identify the boundary of your design so that you can start and use that as an anchor point for examining and influencing and designing for the experience bleed that leads up to that now the imposition of a boundary is pretty different for a digital game you've got this rectangle of light you've got some inputs that you touch so digital game design primarily focuses entirely on the revealing of their world rather than having to deal with blocking ours because you're in control of absolutely everything in there breath of the wild doesn't have to worry about making sure there's a mountain over here so that nobody sees you know downtown los angeles but basically it focuses on that because they can't block ours so when theme parks use berms to block out sites permanently the reason they're doing that is to reduce contradictions if i'm in tomorrowland uh and i can see frontierland that would completely break my immersion and those elements would start to cancel each other out with consoles especially mobile ones it can seem a little bit hopeless because there's so little control over that environment and as a designer you you can consider this not your problem but also the real world is not going anywhere and the lack of control does not mean a complete lack of influence i think nintendo has thought a lot about this when pursuing mobile and social play the use of amiibos or how joy-cons are able to reconfigure for different styles of play these are different methods for them to exert influence over the experience bleed of the games that are played on their system and you don't actually have to own the platform to influence that player experience in an arg like i love bees it was an entirely auxiliary design devoted to bringing fans into the halo universe and yet a completely different type of experience but it still provided a connection and a portal that allowed them to be even more engaged with the game but it doesn't have to be quite this extreme a lot of you are already working on different ways to influence the experience bleed through social media or marketing or even exhibiting at events like this even at a booth at gdc you can influence that experience bleed for your game you can attract surprise and delight an audience into forgetting about the meeting they need to go to or how nervous they are about their talk this is butt sniffing pugs a completely digital game but in order to provide a better experience in order to attract people in order to change people's perceptions and forget about things that they were doing they put that effort into influencing that bleed by putting down the astroturf and making that alternative controller and turning it into something where it isn't just fun to play but it's actually fun to watch people play so the point is this design lens i think is still really applicable to digital because you can't get rid of the real world so how can you make people forget about it for just a little bit this is a gif of luftrausers by vlambeer i built a as an experiment an alternative controller to shift the style of play from deep mental focus to an embodied form of play so i created cardboard wings put tilts tilt switches on the ends of them for steering buttons at the end of the wings for firing and a foot pedal to accelerate and this is to get people to embrace like the external experience it was an entirely new feeling and a lot of fun to both play and watch it became a fundamentally different experience similar to what we sports accomplished uh when playing games like tennis we found that player failure was a lot more fun and it actually shifted the skills needed to be good at the game so it was a great a great spectacle but also very exhausting so i think it's also good to take a look at other mediums and communities and fandoms for how they reduce the contradictions in their experiences and how they transition their audiences to fully say yes to the designed reality whether it be a game a film or whatever it happens to be a rocky horror audience goes much deeper than simply putting on costumes many bring an array of props like rice and rubber gloves and noise makers some venues or events will even provide some of these props so that people that are new to these experiences are more encouraged to get involved and be fully prepared for when that film begins now the boundary in this case is the film itself it's what's displayed on the screen you could just walk into the theater sit down they press play and bam there you go but it's these other acts these influences that change that bleed that makes it much more enjoyable and a really special thing for the fans there's a lot of places that are exploring this in a lot of really interesting ways beyond just theme parks meow wolf in phoenix with immersive art and storytelling sleep no more new york with immersive theater two-bit circus in la a modern arcade with amusements and layers of meta-games throughout the space or can-can wonderland in the twin cities uh which is has artist-designed mini golf unique games and interesting entertainment experiences and of course escape rooms which have become an entire industry unto themselves but escape rooms are often the most guilty in not considering the experience bleed the boundary is obvious the door opens you put in the room the door closes the clock starts bam there you go this is actually the first escape room i designed called utopia room and we managed to win an award for it which was awesome but sadly my influence over um stopped at the boundary and i had no ability for that experience to uh bleed beyond that door so and and for players the experience when going to something like an escape room begins long before uh they enter that room it may be when they uh finally find a parking spot it may even be before then they're in a state of anticipation uh which is a really perfect state for designers to start whispering in their ears but without any influence it's also really easy for players to put them in a state that is not conducive for that and you end up with something really jarring so in this case the onboarding i think is really really important to help them forget the world they came from and be prepared to enter that new one so the bleed being ignored really hurt the experience even after the boundary personally i would have a lot of trouble adjusting if like i opened a closet suddenly stumbled into narnia without so much as a coat cumness appears tells me that i have 60 minutes to keep the white witch from killing us all first five minutes i'd just be sputtering around trying to get my bearings and i want that 60 minutes i want all 60 minutes to be fulfilling and engaging and not stressful and jarring so i'm not saying that you're not already doing a lot of these things but that looking at the experiences you design through some of these lenses can help you notice spots that you've missed or areas that you haven't been paying attention to before not to mention as more and more devices collect in our homes and all around us with internet of things and smart lights and tv reactive leds and smart speakers and who knows what else there are going to be more and more ways for designers to reach out of the digital into the physical world and put more and more influence so imagine a software update where you can approve your switch to talk to your hue light bulbs and set the mood a bit when you're playing breath of the wild and maybe they stick a projector on the back of your tv so the weather pattern is always on your ceiling so you get that nice warm beautiful sunny day or the ominous clouds rolling in and things can get spooky and maybe this is really dumb but it also kind of seems a little fun too and i think like it's worth continuing to reevaluate these things and look at what's possible whether you design in real spaces like myself or in the digital and his consoles change and what we play on changes other tech is going to change we'll be able to use a lot more of this tech and blur that boundary between the digital uh and the rest this is a game i created called solyndrus it's a four player wireless game with a 2d field wrapped around a cylinder creating this continuous space so the real world in this case becomes part of the constraints it becomes part of the mechanics the level itself has to exist on a physical space and therefore cannot be in uh infinite uh and this forces you to incorporate moving around that digital or virtual world in order to better understand it but essentially it's still just a video game slapped onto a cylinder this is one called please stand by it's a 1950s television set with a completely digital component but all of the interface is using the physical and the rabbit ears the hitting the side of the tv using the knobs it stands out because it is out of place in time but not in space it's a familiar artifact that belongs in a space so even though the game is digital and just made in unity it could be played without any of those other components the controls for this experience live within the bleed and that experience will bleed into your memories related to such a familiar artifact so i want to leave you with the final thought of like how do you use the space between your players and your game because it doesn't have to be empty so think about where the boundary is for what you've created that point where you have full control and then think about what happens before there and how people come up to that so thank you very much uh yeah so if anybody has any questions uh hopefully we have a couple of minutes but uh yeah

Channel: GDC

Views: 45,015

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

Id: wn27AGuE49A

Length: 33min 7sec (1987 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2022