Architectural Approach to Level Design

Second edition

Christopher W. Totten

• Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351116282
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Written by a game developer and professor trained in architecture, An Architectural Approach to Level Design is one of the first books to integrate architectural and spatial design theory with the field of level design. It explores the principles of level design through the context and history of architecture.

Now in its second edition, An Architectural Approach to Level Design presents architectural techniques and theories for you to use in your own work. The author connects architecture and level design in different ways that address the practical elements of how designers construct space and the experiential elements of how and why humans interact with that space. It also addresses industry issues like how to build interesting tutorial levels and how to use computer-generated level design systems without losing the player-focused design of handmade levels. Throughout the text, you will learn skills for spatial layout, evoking emotion through gamespaces, and creating better levels through architectural theory.

FEATURES

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• Presents case studies that offer insight on modern level design practices, methods, and tools

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• Presents perspectives from industry designers, independent game developers, scientists, psychologists, and academics

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• Explores how historical structures can teach us about good level design

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• Shows how to use space to guide or elicit emotion from players

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• Includes chapter exercises that encourage you to use principles from the chapter in digital prototypes, playtesting sessions, paper mock-ups, and design journals

Bringing together topics in game design and architecture, this book helps you create better spaces for your games. Software independent, the book discusses tools and techniques that you can use in crafting your interactive worlds.

Chapter 1

A Brief History of Architecture and Level Design

Alot of game designers think of architecture as a thing to study when they need historic precedents to enhance their environment art or create an epic backdrop for their game. Using architectural forms that the player recognizes but may associate with exotic places is one way to enhance the experience of your game. These experiences enhance a game’s ability to bring players into its make-believe world and provide the feeling that the player’s actions have some sort of effect on important events. These can be good uses for architectural history, but by truly understanding humanity’s built past, we can learn more exactly how space affects interactivity.

Looking to historic precedents can have other important effects for designers, too. Beyond being inspirations for backdrops, historical spaces have many lessons to teach about how space is composed. While form has always been a consideration of architects, historic buildings were also built with a great focus on the experience they created for visitors. As such, level designers looking to architecture for insight into their own work can learn a great deal about composing sight lines, telling stories with levels, inviting social play, and many other spatial design principles by carefully studying historic structures.

This chapter provides a brief overview of architectural history with a focus on the buildings that are important for our explorations in the rest of the book. We look at the evolution of gamespaces to discover how game rules and technological limitations have created interesting design opportunities. Finally, we explore some guidelines for visual analysis that will influence how we play gamespaces.

What you will learn in this chapter:

• Breaking the rules of level design
• An experiential history of architecture
• The history of gamespaces
• Ways of seeing for level design

BREAKING THE RULES OF LEVEL DESIGN

Let us get something out of the way early on: is level design a field that one enters by learning software or by learning theory? As a follow-up question: is level design a field that should be advanced through new software or new theory? These are not really easy questions to answer and for most developers, what is most important might change over time.

On one hand, the limitations of the platform upon which a given game is developed or the workflow that a game engine supports have a great impact on how a designer works. For many designers, understanding how technology impacts design brings a wealth of intrigue. Digital game development has traditionally been seen as a discipline related to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), so the idea that technology is core to understanding game worlds is not far off from many designers’ feelings. You hear lots of industry veterans speak poorly of “game studies” as a discipline because it often fails to include the practical use of game-making software. For designers in a tools-first camp, level design is something one studies by opening an engine like Unreal and mastering the building process.

Theory-focused designers, on the other hand, see technology as a means to an end, a tool for creating experiences that are otherwise described by intangible ideas like spatial psychology and game feel. For these designers, studying other games is important: learning from the successes and failures of previous designs is a way to build new and better ones. This allows them to decode the more mysterious elements of game experiences through theoretical guidelines rather than technology “best practices.”

Among the many facets of game design, level design is one of the most difficult to isolate as having one correct methodology. The tools and techniques that build a great level for one game do not always translate into other games or genres. Saying that all designers should focus on technology or theory fails in a lot of ways: there are lots of games designed around theoretical goals that ignore basic playability or bug-fixing. There are also wonderful showcases for technology, such as recreating a real-world building or city in a game engine, that fail because these places don’t make very interesting game levels.

Level design cannot be learned in the same way something like 3D game art can. With few exceptions, there is an accepted way of creating 3D art, just as there are accepted ways of creating game sound or specific classes one would use for defining inputs when scripting in a game engine. Software-based tutorials for level design typically utilize engines geared toward specific game types (often first-person shooters). While these demonstrate software-specific methods that get developers started with a tool, they often do little to teach developers what makes spaces memorable.

Confused yet? That’s okay: at the time of this writing, level design is undergoing an identity crisis that game design has been undergoing for several decades. Prior to 2003, books on the general design of games and game design theory were rare, and many books on “game design” were actually software or coding manuals. One of the earliest examples of a book devoted to game design theory is The Art of Computer Game Design ¹ by Chris Crawford. Written in 1984, it was one of the few game design theory books for many years. In the 2000s, publications such as Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, ² Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, ³ The Art of Game Design, ⁴ and Game Design Workshop ⁵ advanced the field from purely computational to an aesthetic practice. These books take a much more generalist approach to game design, showing readers how to conceive of games through their mechanical, narrative, or experiential elements. Ian Schreiber and Brenda Brathwaite’s Challenges for Game Designers ⁶ has readers actively deconstruct games to learn new things about them. In this way, games become modular systems that can be shaped by designers rather than the result of specific how-to manuals. Many of these books draw from fields outside of game design to influence their material. Salen and Zimmerman discuss not only the design of famous games, but also the work of psychologists, designers, architects, and others to synthesize how one might create games.

We need to similarly break the rules of how we understand level design if we are to advance it. While it can be beneficial to explore the design of levels for games of specific genres, there is also a lot of room for generalization. For example, if we were to say, “In first-person shooters, it is tactically advantageous to have a high position to shoot from,” this could be a good criterion for designing deathmatch maps: having lots of sniping positions and crisscrossing catwalks. If we remove the specificity to first-person shooters, however, we can say, “It is advantageous to have a high position when in a game level.” This can then be applied to stealth games, fighting games, platformers, first-person shooters, and many others (Figure 1.1). Understanding this, a developer working in a specific engine can apply this spatial knowledge in whatever way works best for it: creating a tall BSP Brush geometry in Unreal, importing a tall level object into Unity, building a tall structure with tiles in Game Maker, etc. This is how I approach level design in this book: as information that designers can utilize in the context of their software of choice.

FIGURE 1.1 Height generally offers strategic advantages to players in game levels. This is a guideline that can apply to many game genres and types.

In this way, architectural history has a lot to show us about how gamespaces can be constructed. Some of the most famous pieces of architecture are the result of a designer taking an intangible idea and embodying it in a structure that has to support occupants, withstand the elements, and not fall down. Architecture is a field built on practical theory that can provide level designers with insight in both how humans perceive space, and cool ways to construct space. If we understand level design as the application of a broad set of general spatial theories applied to playable games, we can use experientially rich architecture—that means to elicit an emotional response from occupants or affect their behavior in some way—as a precedent for our own level designs.

AN EXPERIENTIAL HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE

There are many ways to understand the history of architecture. Some writers focus on a history of structural components: post-and-lintel construction, column types, arches, domes, vaults, etc. (Figure 1.2). Others focus on the evolutions of styles over time. Some styles have philosophies that impact how one explores works in that style, but often they focus on the formal or sculptural aspects of buildings. Lastly, there is the evolution of architectural experiences. These can be closely related to cultural factors of the times and places in which they were built. They often most closely reflect the ideas of the designers and bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ■ A Brief History of Architecture and Level Design
• Chapter 2 ■ Drawing for Level Designers
• Chapter 3 ■ Level Design Workflows
• Chapter 4 ■ Basic Gamespaces
• Chapter 5 ■ Communicating through Environment Art
• Chapter 6 ■ Building Exciting Levels with Dangerous Architecture
• Chapter 7 ■ Rewards in Gamespaces
• Chapter 8 ■ Level 1–1
• Chapter 9 ■ Storytelling in Gamespaces
• Chapter 10 ■ Possibility Spaces and Worldbuilding
• Chapter 11 ■ Working with Procedurally Generated Levels
• Chapter 12 ■ Influencing Social Interaction with Level Design
• Chapter 13 ■ Sound, Music, and Rhythm in Level Design
• Conclusion
• Index