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Arrange like creatures in a hierarchical manner Chex Mix is a ubiquitous party snack that is also damn tasty. It contains—in varying concentrations—bagel chips, pretzels, corn chexs, wheat chexs, and some squiggly breadstick looking thing, all of which are mixed together in a large bowl. Chex Mix is good because you can grab a handful of it and munch away and basically get a different texture with every bite. I mean no disrespect to the good folks at General Mills when I say this, but the Chex Mix model—which basically boils down to “everything mixed together is good”—makes for questionable level design. Variety is the spice of life, this is true, but when trying to place base population in a game world, unnecessary variety can be a bad thing. Too many different creatures in the same area can be just as off putting as too few. Take the following example for instance: You’re exploring a dungeon an RPG when you suddenly realize that the only thing keeping the thirty goblins in the first room from being eaten by the dragon in the second room is a flimsy wooden door. Sure the door denotes some kind of boundary, but still, such coincidental proximity rarely occurs in nature. Why doesn’t the dragon just break down the door to snack on the goblins who would make easy prey? This mistake is fairly consistent throughout game worlds: creatures that do not belong together are placed together simply because the designer wanted to switch up the tempo of the encounters… a commendable goal, but one that is too often achieved at the expense of believability. Ultimately, Chex Mix style population makes for an exciting game world, a world where anything can be waiting around the next bend, but it also induces a kind of mindlessness in the player, a state in which the player enters a new level and immediately goes through the same laundry list of tactics that worked in the first few environments. It destabilizes the game world and forces the player to suspend disbelief, both of which are detrimental to creating an immersive experience. So, how then does a designer know where to draw the line between variety and believability of encounter types? Simple, just apply the litmus test of asking yourself if the creatures that you’re mixing together exist in a hierarchical relationship. Take the above example of the goblins and the dragon: what if rather then placing the dragon in the room next to the goblins, the dragon was instead confined to a lower cavern of the cave-system, tucked away in a secluded passage, its lair littered with goblin skulls? Certainly portrays a clearer idea of how the goblins and the dragon interact with one another, does it not? Not only is this set up more compelling from a world building standpoint, but it also justifies the dragon’s existence in the dungeon in the first place; it’s there to eat! It also obliquely explains why all the goblins have banded together in the upper cavern: they don’t want to be eaten! (This pair of facts ties in nicely to the rule of congregating creatures in groups around resources above). This makes sense because the goblins and the dragon exhibit a predator-prey relationship. They interact with each other as well as the player. There are many hierarchies that exist in the real world. Just to name a few there are hierarchies of predator-prey relationships, parasite-host relationships, master-slave relationships, leader-follower relationships, creator-created relationships, parent-offspring relationships and so on.
Here’s the deal, place as much encounter variety into one area as you like—I’m not going to impose any rules here—all I ask is that for each NPC type you use, make sure it has a hierarchical relationship with at least one, but preferably all, other NPC types in the immediate vicinity. Going back to Half Life as an example, remember the head crabs? They’re these fast little buggers that leap out of nowhere and try to latch onto your face. When the head crabs are nearby, you also encounter their victims, which are humans with head crabs latched to their faces, the parasite obviously controlling and altering the DNA of its host to turn them into a hulking zombie. The head crab and the head crab victim are two very different encounter types from a game play standpoint—one is small and fast and agile and the other is slow and hits like a truck—but they make sense together because they have a clearly defined hierarchical relationship. So when designing your next game level, throw some artificer mages in with your clanking iron golems. Path a Predator hunting party through your Alien-filled canyon (assuming you have access to both the Predator and Alien movie copyrights!). Spawn goblin slaves around the ogre slave master. This will cinch your game world together by conveying how all the creatures relate to one another. They’re not just waiting around to fight the player; they have their own lives, activities and organizations going on. |
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