Gamasutra Feature: Level Design in a Day: Your Questions, Answered

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Level Design in a Day: Your Questions, Answered

1. What are common mistakes or key things level designers look for after the first pass of a level is finished? What are some common flaws in level design that tend to be overlooked?

Jim Brown - The two main things I tend to look out for are sloppiness and poor assumptions on the part of the LD. The vast majority of bugs in scripting, cover, collision, and general level design happen because someone gets complacent or rushes through the "boring" parts of design. If you have good attention to detail and treat every aspect of the level as important, then you'll be much better off (faster, cleaner, easier) in the long run.

Secondly, LDs sometimes build a level assuming that the player will proceed through it in the same manner that the LD who built it will get through it. Just because you've played it 500 times doesn't mean the end user has, and they will be facing backwards at the wrong moment, hit triggers out of order, go the wrong way, and break your level in every way imaginable. First pass maps tend to be very "golden path" and quickly fall apart when the systems are stressed. Aside from that, we sometimes just need to "get things working" so first pass maps do just that... and then need massive optimizations in performance, memory, pacing, and difficulty.

Steve Gaynor - For me, the first pass is layout and flow, the second pass is lighting and visibility. Knowing the shape, size, and connectivity of spaces is a good first step, but as soon after this as possible, you need to start playing through like a player would and think, "When I enter this space, how do I know where to go? How do I know where enemies might be coming from? How do I orient myself if I get turned around and lose my way?"

The two biggest aspects of these issues are sightlines and lighting. You have to determine what the player can see from each point in the level, and what is occluded. For instance, if you enter a space and you can see two doors on the far wall, is one more important than the other? Is the player supposed to enter one first? Maybe set up a sight blocker so they only see one door first, and can't see the second one until they've reached the first one, and so in all likelihood will go in there first instead of skipping it. Can I see entrances, egresses, and important objects?

If the lighting is too even, nothing is prioritized. Look at how you can throw spotlights and shadows around to highlight important things, so the player can get a lay of the land on first glance. Once you have the flow laid out, and a good idea of what the player's visual understanding of the major concepts in the spaces will be, you're in a good position to move on to smaller nuts-and-bolts aspects of placing incidentals in each room.

Seth Marinello - Once I have a white box layout of the level complete, one of the first things I will do is review the room sizes and sightlines in order to plan out our visibility strategy. Since the environments we create for Dead Space are so high-detail, it is very important we get a handle on how the space can be divided for performance at an early stage. One of the worst things that can happen is having to slice a room in half after months of trying force an over-complex space through the GPU.

As to overlooked problems, I find pacing can be hard to read early in development. Without dialog and scripted moments, a level can feel empty and the feedback tends to add more combat, resulting in pacing problems once the rest of the content comes online. It is important to be aware of this and schedule polish time to address these issues.

Rudy.cz

Cool article, looking forward to put those advices to use in my next project. Also this should be linked in NS2 Mapping - Guides and Resources topic