An Approach to Holistic Level Design

Okay, I think I'm going to get started soon.

Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Lee. This talk is called An Approach to Holistic Level Design.

Before I get started, I'd like to remind everyone to turn off your phones and make sure you fill in your review forms after the talk.

Especially if you stayed in from the last talk, I think you need to leave the room and

And make sure you, at the end of the talk, make sure you get scanned so that you can receive the notification to review the talk.

Finally, if, oh, we're looking fairly forward, but in general it's cool if you can sit closer to the middle so it's easier for people to sit down if they enter during the talk.

And also, yeah, there's no filming allowed after like the first five minutes of the talk, I've been told.

Okay, so a little bit about me. I've been a level designer in the industry for about 10 years now, shipping these four games.

The first one in the list is an open-world action-driving game,

but since then I've kind of deliberately made moves towards first-person games and games with an increasingly kind of holistic approach to level design in terms of how I see it

that satisfy a particular set of values. Particularly the last two, Bioshock, and especially Dishonored 2,

which are games that belong to this genre known as Immersive Sims, which I'll touch on a lot.

I'll kind of discuss a lot of ideas kind of connected to that genre.

So one thing to bear in mind is that while I hope the ideas I talk about in this presentation are kind of relevant to many kinds of games,

I should say that these three games are three of my favorites of all time, and they kind of, you know, this talk is very much informed by their sensibilities.

Okay, so what do I mean by holistic level design? the

dictionary says it will talk about how holistic thinking is generally about seeing everything every part of a design in terms of how it affects the whole and how the whole can be much greater than the sum of its parts

my favourite summary of this idea is a quote from this great book called 101

Things I Learned at Architecture School which isn't a level design book but I recommend it to all level designers, it's got a lot of stuff that's very has very strong parallels to the

creative process and that kind of thing The quote is about the nature of beauty, and it goes like this.

Beauty is due more to the harmonious relationships among the elements of a composition than to the elements themselves.

And needless to say, I think this is often very true of level design.

So speaking of the elements of a composition, these are the three elements I'm going to talk about in games, which are, well, referred to, which are presentation, gameplay, and story.

if you just categorize all the different parts of games into these three main pillars.

And note here that by presentation, I generally mean all the audio, visual output of the game, and so graphics and sound, and everything the player sees, but also text and stuff like that.

And I'll get into why later. Now, these big three elements are all very important in their own right, all deserving of talks dedicated to each of them.

But this talk is specifically about how everything works together.

So I'm going to focus on topics that emerge from the relationships between these things instead of the things themselves.

So to explain what I mean by this, between these pillars of gameplay and presentation, I'm going to talk about these concepts of affordances and intentionality.

Between the way we present things in story emerges this idea we refer to as world building.

And finally, between gameplay and story emerges this idea of interactive narrative and all that kind of thing.

So, yeah, so this is a talk to kind of highlight and summarize these things and give a few tips on what we can do to apply them in our level design.

So, first up, affordances and intentionality, two concepts which emerge from this relationship between gameplay and the way we present things.

I'm going to talk about affordances first and then use that to lead into the concept of intentionality because they're very strongly connected.

so affordances is this term that is generally considered to come from the

world of industrial design a great book to read

about this is this one the design of everyday things by

don norman and the classic

example of affordances in action is the design of door handles so

if you look at this photo you can see two doors and the one on the left should be pushed the one on the right should be pulled and the problem here is that the the handles for both of these doors look the same.

And also, they both look like they should be pulled. So you can imagine how people will approach the door on the left and intuitively pull it instead of pushing it and look like a bit of a fool.

So here, we can say that the affordances of these door handles on the left are very poorly designed because they're misleading.