I am an idiot

Spirit linked an old post in another thread, I was multitasking and forgot that it was an old post and then replied to it :)

Yes, L4D2 has some cool level design. Hard Rain is very memorable indeed. 

Perhaps the best example of underusing the structure of a level I can think of is Bullet Storm. That game had so many epic areas and so much time was obviously spent on the environment art, but the gameplay was little more than walk into room, kill a bunch of shit and proceed to the next room. In addition, the gameplay was very flat - it was a fun game, however.

Not played bullstorm but iirc Painkiller was exactly like this (epic impressive environment art dressing up essentially a series of huge box rooms), from the same developer incidently.

The interesting thing with Painkiller is that the developers were clearly Quake fans, with the general feel of the movement, secrets, trick jumping and all that Quakey stuff, yet they decided not to use any of the level design principles that worked so well in Quake. In many ways the game felt to me as if the levels had been built from scratch by artists with absolutely no communication from the designers as to what gameplay was going to take place in them.

There are a few reasons I can think for avoiding intricately interwoven levels

One argument that was presented to me by an artist was that if you have a big open area, the most environmental detail can be focused around the playable space, and built with a certain direction of movement in mind, and the background stuff can be largely optimised as the player won't get close to it. If you take the same large area but you make the playable space occupy a greater % of the overall space (e.g. you allow the room to be traversed in different ways at different times), then the average density of detail required goes right up. Personally I think that decent design can make that a fairly weak argument but it is food for thought.

I remember working on an action platformer a few years back where the lead artist was trying to convince us to use a God of War-style fixed camera so that all they had to worry about was essentially two back walls and a floor :)

We went with a proper "look anywhere" 3rd person camera thankfully. 

I certainly wouldn't hate you for employing a "find X buttons to open exit" style of design!

Cheers! At least I know one person will play it then :}

Maybe I should try and free it up a little.

I think it can make for a more rewarding experience both for the player and the mapper - It's funny, making a level that's very non-linear gives me a wierd sense of nerdy glee, as if I'm crafting a real functional place, rather than piecing together a predictable script. One worry though is that the encounter design could suffer, as I need to accomodate the fact that the player infil points and order in which he encounters monsters is going to be pretty damn unpredictable for the most part... 

Fuck yes/ fuck you - looks totally awesome and perfectly detailed/scaled. 

Thanks!

Tbh, I didn't intend to pimp this early (as you can tell from the unaligned textures and stuff) :} 

yeah, what were you thinking?!

;)
very atmospheric. looking forward to this :) 

The new Deus Ex had some good level design, always fairly open with lots of vertical action and choices, obviously a deus ex with linear levels wouldn't really be deus ex though.
Also Bioshock (1&2) both had fairly non-linear levels that felt comparable to some quake levels.

I get bored of over-linear FPS and rarely finish or even play them nowadays... 

Do players actually notice if light does not have a realistic source? I don't (unless it is a really bright spotlight and the game/map's narrative is realistic.

Kinn: that looks amazing. did I tell you that you and czg should team up? because you and czg should team up. I tell you! 

I agree modern games would benefit from more (vertical) interconnectivity. It probably depends on the type of game (or its goal), though, e.g. not applicable to or desired in those countless games that are just long series of setpieces.

As for nonlinearity, however, let's face it: people are always quick to criticize modern FPS for their extreme linear design, and rightly so, but as soon as they come across a nonlinear section themselves, even long-time Quake players in a Quake level, it often boils down to getting lost and confused. And then it's all the mapper's fault for not making the right route obvious enough.
Think back when you first played the game, though - didn't feeling lost in those strange and hostile environments actually add to the game experience, the atmosphere? Of course, back then combat skills and FPS mechanics weren't as well-trained as today, so it may be possible that players today are more easily bored and thus have a "decreased willingness" to explore, which could be linked back to the expectations of an average gamer nowadays and the question why modern FPS are what they are. 

Nice post, negke.

We find that a lot. If we give players choices of routes, they get angry because they don't know which one is the "right" one. If we only give them one route, they complain about lack of exploration. It kinda sucks, to be honest... 

What I usually do is deliberately take the "wrong" route (if it's clear which one leads on and which one is a dead end) or go in the opposite direction just to have explored everything.

I just thought about situations where the explorable space is restricted by obstacles, closed doors, or clip walls (sometimes areas that actually ARE interconnected), and the worst possible thing a designer can do: a "leaving the mission area" kill/restart trigger. This made an awkwardly appropriate allegory pop up in my head: it's like walking your dog, but pulling him away from stuff as soon as he intends to sniff on them - for the walk is not about his personal enjoyment, the sole purpose is for him to take a dump. So... when that's done you can actually turn around go back home. 

I only played through Dead Space late last year so it's fairly fresh in my mind. I'm sure it has been discussed here, but it seems relevant to the current discussion, so:

One of the best features of the game was the little help system which would draw a path to the target on the ground. At any point you could press the relevant button and see where to go, but the path would fade out after a few seconds. Since it wasn't "always on" it eliminated one of the major negative aspects of some other navigational aids (i.e. when you're too busy watching the sparkly shit or the HUD arrow to actually look at the environment and soak up the atmosphere).

Of course, what I would often do (and what I'm sure everybody would do!) is press the button to discover the "correct" path, turn around and go in the opposite direction to find all the secrets and explore... then go back to the main route again.

It's not perfect, but it allowed some degree of choice and exploration while still ensuring that the player could never really get lost. A pretty good compromise which allowed for at least a little non-linearity while eliminating potential confusion and frustration. Since it was player activated and temporary you only used it when you needed it, but you could go forth with the confidence that you both know where you're going and that you didn't leave anything behind. 

That was a nice mechanic. The second one sort of took the fun out of it a bit by allowing you to look for different map elements like stores, work benches and so on.

Playing Bioshock2 now - which is a pretty good game (fuck the gaming press!) and has a simialr sort of compass to many games. Combined with the map it allows you to hunt down everything, which I think most players seem to enjoy doing, at least when the core mechanics are fun.

When people say non-linear I get the feeling that they mean not closed in. CZG07b for example is completely linear, with a few offshoots for secrets. It does not feel linear though since you revisit several areas at different heights and coming from different directions.

Compare it with the word examples of corridor design which allows for little to no exploration. And usually has 100's of identical doors, some of which you're allowed to open, some not.

Oh, and clip walls across otherwise open terrain. Those are great.

http://hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2006-07-17 

i was just thinking that i actually hate it more when i choose the RIGHT route because that means i have to backtrack so i can go explore everything. :P 

I don't think that being linear and making the route obvious are mutually exclusive. It's possible to do the latter without locking yourself into the former - just look at the id1 maps for a good example. They're littered with little arrows hinting "go this way", when you find a key you're normally dropped to the door that needs it very soon after (it's often on a ledge or ramp above the door, even). You're still free to explore, you can get yourself wonderfully lost as much as you want, but you can always find where you need to be quickly enough. 

about the id levels (eps 1, 2 and 3 at least) are that they are all small enough so that even if you are totally lost, a quick wander will generally always lead you back to somewhere that orientates you. Also, I find each area is pretty good at being distinct and recognisable.

Episode 4 is by far the weakest in this regard as the maps have lots of corridors that kinda look the same. 

Is probably old news, but yet another indie roguelike is making fame:

http://spelunkyworld.com/

Been laid up with flu and playing this. Terrible, yet oddly compelling design. 

That must be some flu indeed.

I'll agree some things are unintuitive, or plain out frustrating, but just about everything can be mastered over time. And that's pretty much the point of anything that claims to have roguelike elements, right? 

I'm a student of games design... when things are unintuitive or frustrating it seems to go against everying I've been learning all this time.

But its a lot of fun, hope they do well with the port. 

That bandwagon nearly killed me! 

Rules are made to be broken, once you know them. Spelunky would be half as interesting if it was more intuitive and user friendly, it's one of the strong points of roguelikes, even recent ones (see Binding of Isaac). 

Much preferred The Binding tbh. The design felt like it was on my (the player's) side more. I ended up 100% on that one.

A lot of playtesting has gone into Spelunky, but it seems many things are just, well, broke.

Maybe I haven't played far enough, but why are the shortcut tunnels not on the main screen? I can see the arguments for them off to one side, but none of them doesn't boil down to 'frustrate the player' at its core.

Intuitive and user friendly don't have to be the pariahs of games design.

Granted that most designers that focus on these don't really like the game they're making, and it comes out in how it plays.

There must exist a bridge between Garage and Indie design, just a case of figuring it out.

Not ignoring the Roguelike element, but thats just a description of a format, and one that's inherently friendly to small dev teams since its not necessary to spend all that time building full levels. 

Antibiotics. Ignore most of the above. 

Because I got into it after Supa recommended it in like 2009. 

Unintuitive was probably the wrong word.

Unpredictable, rather.