The
bar for the visual quality of environments in games keeps getting
higher with each new generation of hardware and software. To meet
that bar and push it even further will require the integration of
real world design skills as well as a keen sense of gameplay and game
design. Attending an architectural design or any sort of design school
is of course not absolutely necessary to be a good level designer,
but it can help widen your scope of experience. Architectural Design
and Level Design are two very different pursuits, the point is really
to investigate how looking beyond traditional and often overused game
design references and approaches can help to bring an added dimension
to the experience of making and playing games. What we would like
to do is give you an overview of what you might learn in the first
year of an architectural design studio and given our own experiences,
how that ended up tying into wide variety of games.
Going
to an architecture school these days is much less about the technology
of how buildings are built and much more about looking at how human
culture continues to express itself through shelter, one of our most
basic requirements. Technology and the expression of design ideas
and gameplay also seem to be becoming less closely tied together.
We in the industry are witnesses to the explosion of licensable engine
technologies and subsequent number of games with the same core technology
but very different game ideas. Without the technology games like the
kind we've all played and worked on are just crazy game ideas and
without those crazy game ideas games become just slick technology
demos.
The
most important thing you learn in architecture school in the first
few years is; what's the difference between an architectural idea
and an architectural device. Basically, an architectural idea is an
idea that says something meaningful about how people experience a
given piece of architecture; an architectural device is what specific
means you use to express that idea. For example, a window is an architectural
device to get light, air and visibility into a building and can be
as simple as a hole cut in a wall. An architectural idea about that
window might be something like how that window is made to separate
the pedestrian public view from a space that's supposed to be private.
To express this idea you might frost a piece of glass or place the
window very high up; suddenly that window becomes much more than just
a hole cut in the wall. The same approach goes for level design. It's
important to have a clear idea for what a level is about. If you say,
"I'm going to do a deathmatch level", that isn't a level
design idea, it's just a vehicle for expressing an idea. You could
think of the term "deathmatch level" as a vehicle or device
for expressing some idea about people getting together in a space
for the purpose of killing each other until someone reaches a certain
score.
Having
an architectural idea or level design gameplay idea is the most important
thing in either pursuit, and beyond that finding an appropriate means
to express that idea is the real trick. You will often discover in
the process of finding that means of expression whether your idea
was any good in the first place, or in the case of games whether or
not your idea was any fun. Let's assume that you have a really great
idea for a game and its levels, how do you go about coming up with
ways to express that idea?
We can
start by defining what the qualities of a level are. Level design
is very architectural in nature. Levels are spatial experiences of
environments that are usually inhabited by you as some sort of avatar
and a host of other vaguely humanoid creatures. They have a program
in the architectural sense of the word, meaning basically a list of
functions like living room, conference room, mad-scientist experiment
room, temporal anomaly generator room, etc. They require expenditures
of time, labor, funding, and to some extent natural resources, and
they are constructed by human hands. So, applying an architectural
design methodology makes a certain degree of sense. In order to apply
such a methodology to games, it is useful to describe some of the
basic elements of spatial design. These elements are really architectural
devices in the form of basic design principles for organizing and
developing space. They are applicable principles instead of physical
objects like the window. It's kind of like the principle in games
that puzzles should be hard to do, not hard to figure out what to
do. A-lot of this presentation will be a description of those basic
principles as they apply to level design, in the hope that they will
help you to more clearly and more inventively express your ideas.
Games
are ultimately about having a fun, entertaining, and meaningful experience.
What we're interested in here is in how you get from a great starting
idea to a final finished game. Designing that experience is not unlike
the process of designing architecture. Level design, like architectural
design, is about finding the appropriate means of expressing your
ideas about gameplay. What follows is an investigation of how using
the approaches and methodologies of a very closely related field can
serve to enhance the process of designing games. Some of the key concepts
to design and evaluate architecture are introduced. Path or circulation,
how you move through a building, will be outlined. Tools to organize
a scheme will be described, and then we will discuss event and character
as it relates to level design.
The
first book many architecture students are required to read is, "Architecture;
Form, Space and Order", by Francis Ching. There are many introductory
architectural texts but this one is the probably the easiest to understand
and best illustrated texts for the uninitiated. It gives a-lot of
examples of built work and has some really great diagrams. A-lot of
what we refer to in this lecture is also described in more detail
in this book. It's a great way to get an idea of how architects all
over the world have been exploring the same basic principles of design
since people have been constructing shelter.