GDC 2011 Level Design Workshop

(110) Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business
Monday, Feb. 28, 10am-6pm

Speakers

• Coray Seifert, Senior Game Designer, Arkadium
• Neil Alphonso,Lead Designer, Splash Damage
• Matthias Worch, Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games
• Jim Brown, Lead Level Designer, Epic Games
• Joel Burgess, Senior Designer, Bethesda Softworks
• Forrest Dowling, Senior Designer, Irrational Games
• Ed Byrne, Creative Director, Zipper Interactive

Session Description
In this intense day-long tutorial, attendees will gain deep insights from some of the most experienced level designers in the industry, delving into every aspect of the level design process, from early concept and white-boxing to narrative design and level design metrics. This session brings back last-year’s highly-rated tutorial roster with an all-new line-up of best practices, lessons learned, interactive audience participation and case studies from Brink to Dead Space and Gears of War to Fallout 3.

Takeaway
Newcomers to the world of level design will gain a solid foundation in the art and science of level design while experienced level designers will come away from the talk with a bevy of tips, tricks, and best practices being used by the best level designers in the industry. Experienced producers, artists, and testers will gain an intimate understanding of the level design process, and will be better equipped to manage and collaborate with this essential part of the game development process.

Intended Audience
Level designers, mission designers, game designers, and scripters responsible for crafting moment-to-moment gameplay. Writers, level artists, and quality assurance professionals will come away from this talk better prepared to collaborate and contribute to the level creation process. All attendees should have a solid understanding of the level design process, as well as a basic familiarity with the tools of the trade.

My GDC 2011 lecture is announced!

The Identity Bubble – A Design Approach to Character and Story Development

Speaker/s: Matthias Worch (Visceral Games)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Game Design / Lecture

Description: Who is the actor in a game? Is it the person holding the controller in the real world, or the player-character who moves through the game-world? The answer is Both, and the game designer must work carefully to keep the interests of these two consciousnesses aligned. This session presents a design approach for reconciling developer-defined and player-derived character identities. Games often feature strong pre-authored characters and story arcs, while trying to give the player the feeling of uninhibited agency. The practical techniques presented here show how to design stories that dont simply provide a context for the players actions, but instead create impulses and motivations within the player that are in alignment with those of the avatar. Player and avatar float along in unison inside an identity bubble, working towards a common goal.

Takeaway: Attendees understand how games establish a high level of character identification, and they acquire techniques that can be used to achieve similar results. Writers (and developers working with external writers) gain insight into the design and identity concepts that should guide the development of character, story and mission objectives in games.

Intended Audience: Game designers, writers and developers working with external writers.
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Main Conference Pass

Dead Space 2 Trailer

The latest and greatest trailer for Dead Space 2 has been released, hope you like it and will buy the game! It’s hands down the best title I’ve worked on so far. I did the level design for all those “Sprawl in chaos” sections shown in the video.

Internet Indecision

I saw this in the newspaper and immediately had to Google it, post it to my webpage, and let all my Facebook friends know about it.

Oh, an email!

First Dead Space 2 Trailer

You can watch the high-res version of this video on the official Dead Space page.

Isaac Clarke, Patient File

Build a Tower, Build a Team

Important lessons to learn for game development (and many other walks of life).

Dead Space 2 Footage

Coming out of PAX East, here’s a small video of Dead Space 2 in action.

Kotaku has the full story with additional commentary.

With this said, I won’t get into the habit of writing about every little future Dead Space 2 snippet (non-official, no less) that makes it onto the internet. But since it’s the first moving footage of the game, and a scene from one of the levels that I’m working on (I don’t deserve credit for the implementation of this particular sequence, though), and I’m happy to link to it. Hope it gets your imagination going, and thinking about the possibilities.

GDC Responses

I want to catch up on a few articles that have been posted since the Game Developers Conference, all of them recapping and furthering the topics I talked about at the show:

Tim Stellmach, veteran game designer of many esteemed titles, weighs in on the topic of environmental storytelling. Using our GDC session as a starting point, he digs deeper into the idea of systemic environmental storytelling:

“See, for me, the interesting thing about this so-called ‘Systemic Environmental Storytelling’ is that it transfers authorship from the designer to the player. In fact, it has the potential to do so via emergent gameplay behavior, which gives it far more potential for player agency and self-expression than the scripted moments of ‘regular’ Environmental Storytelling.”

It’s a good article, I suggest you go read for yourself! On a different, yet very related tangent, Fantasy Heartbreaker (a blog dedicated to playing D&D “right”) published an article which applies concepts from our talk to the world of pen & paper roleplaying. It’s called Dangerous Archeology:

Smith and Worch are, of course, addressing video games, but their analysis has a lot to offer classic dungeoneering. [...] Environmental story isn’t just the communication of information, it’s another way in which the imaginations of the players and the GM interact. The process is, fundamentally, archaeological: the players unearth the world piece by piece and invest it with meaning from their own speculations and experiences.

It’s great to see both articles expand on the foundation that we tried to lay at GDC. One of the reasons that Harvey and I wanted to do this talk was a feeling that this is a topic many people deeply care about, yet that had been overlooked at previous GDCs.

Not to be outdone, our GDC level design tutorial receives comprehensive coverage on the WorldOfLevelDesign page. Sylvain Douce is covering the entire tutorial in a series of articles, the second of which is a detailed writeup of my session on my session on “Core Space Creation”:

The role of a level designer is to create gameplay through environments and systems. But the task is quite demanding since the gameplay implemented must be meaningful. If it’s not, the game is boring. The play must not feel arbitrary! Try to get all of the game systems connected together: the player can influence more than one of them with a single ability (e.g. the water in Bioshock which can be electrified with the corresponding plasmid).

It’s a good writeup for everybody who wasn’t able to make the tutorial. Admittedly, my session was superficial on a bunch of topics, because I tried to lay the groundwork on (too?) many topic for the rest of the day. But I think it’s a good introduction to 3D action level design.

Calvin & Hobbes

Amazing evocation of emotion in four simple panels. I’d love to attribute credit, but I don’t know where this fake strip originated from (I found out about via Harvey’s Twitter feed).