GDC 2010 - Level Design in a Day Part 4. Cover Object Placement & Multiplayer Level Balancing: Neil Alphonso, Lead Designer, Splash Damage
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Please note: There is a ton of good information in the notes sections of these presentations. Please download locally and view in PowerPoint to experience all the juicy details. In this intense day-long tutorial, attendees will gain deep insights from some of the most experienced level designers in the industry into every aspect of the level design process, from basic navigation and object manipulation tips and tricks to best practices for encounter design and level flow. As the development discipline responsible for crafting the vastly important moment-to-moment player experience, a deep understanding of core level design principles becomes essential for level designers, game designers and design managers alike. Likewise, an intimate familiarity with the level creation process can be a massive advantage to producers, testers or artists in frequent collaboration with level designers. This year’s session will focus on the Unreal Engine, while subsequent years will focus on Source, Quake, and other popular engines.
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GDC 2010 - Level Design in a Day Part 4. Cover Object Placement & Multiplayer Level Balancing: Neil Alphonso, Lead Designer, Splash Damage
- 3. Monkeys ate my brain Cover and Object Placement & Multiplayer Level Balancing
- 4. Cover
- 8. Movement times Combat distances
- 9. Movement times Combat distances Sightlines
- 10. 3rd person cover
- 18. The only constant is change
- 20. Crates!
- 27. Object Placement
- 35. Destructibility
- 41. Multiplayer Level Design in Red Faction Guerrilla Luke Schneider Friday, 4:30pm — 5:30pm
- 53. Practical Techniques for Implementing Emergent Gameplay, Randy Smith and Harvey Smith Orthagonal Unit Differentiation, Harvey Smith www.witchboy.net
- 66. “ The Dark Zone” DM6
- 78. DE_Dust
- 89. Playtests Valve's Approach to Playtesting, Mike Ambinder, PhD www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009
- 96. Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 Jaime Griesemer Thursday, 1:30pm — 2:30pm
- 97. Thanks for listening, the floor is open for questions!
Editor's Notes
- Notes! Woohoo!
- So, we start with cover.. Cover has a couple of primary functions..
- And.. concealment
- 3 of the most important considerations for placing cover are.. Movement times
- Which directly relate to how you can space the cover ..combat distances
- Which also relate to spacing, but they also take into account enemy accuracy and the weapons available to the player And.. sightlines
- Which you can use to control angles of attack, creating a nice balance between protection and aggression So, let's examine some common shooter gametypes as they relate to cover. We'll start with..
- Seeing your character's body allows for a clear view of the protection it offers there are some very early examples, such as:
- Diminishing cover, even!
- First 'modern' style cover shooter
- t_killswitch_gp.wmv Somewhat crude by today's standards, but many principles remain in more current games Now for a more current example..
- a hugely successful franchise, based on the evolution of 3 rd person cover
- gears-short.avi In just in this initial encounter, we see movement times, combat distances, and sightlines, all in one neatly executed package This isn't the only way to use 3 rd person cover..
- Hybrid system, the strength of both 3 rd person cover and first person outside of cover
- vegas-short.avi Strengths come with some limitations, but caution is prevalent in the game's design Moving on to...
- Speeds, combat distances, and sightlines will at some point change But there's a way to hedge your bets against this..Everybody's favourite!
- Modularity is the most practical way to deal with change, you can build anything with LEGO! Which brings us to the LD equivalent of LEGO...
- A must read to understand the cultural implications of crates in game development Crates are ubiquitous in games for some very good reasons:
- You can look at it as a crude manner of gameplay effectiveness to polygon ratio
- Just like the lego bricks I alluded to earlier
- They're very effective as a base; Something needs to be raised? Stick it on crates!
- Their simplicity means for fewer computational traces, which means for cpu overhead
- Often in games collision meshes must be simpler than the visual mesh, again for speed, so with crates, WYSIWYG On from cover, we go to..
- This is certainly not all of the picture, but I'll be talking about
- Or, objects that react to changes in the environment
- Or, shit that breaks
- Or, shit that blows up So, starting with..
- Crysis.avi I'm sure many of you have seen this video. Yes it makes for a nice video, but is it lasting fun? Maybe I'm of the ADD generation, but not for me. But how do we actually leverage this functionality? There's a standout example..
- Physics interactions between the player, NPCs and objects in the environment are key to the gameplay in HL2... though I'm conveniently glossing over the overall narrative awesomeness.
- hl2-short.avi Anything that's not nailed down can be significant to gameplay if the player chooses to make it so.. poor Barney, but he's tough. And, every once in a while a puzzle requires the player to explore these interactions, whether or not they've been utilizing the system to defeat the enemies in the game. Eventually, all you tend to use is the gravity gun. Physics are very effective, as they're immediately intuitive as we spend our out of game existences in a physical realm. Now, on to..
- One of the simplest and most effective tricks is destructibles placed at a height where they're likely to be hit.
- mw2-short.avi It's something that's been learned from Hollywood, and to be fair to a certain degree from Hong Kong... Lots of games do do this, but what's better than chickens?! Even individual oranges, and of course footballs... this level is set in Brazil afterall. Another example, one a bit closer to me..
- Environmental destruction was a key production component of the KZ2 SP campaign
- kz2-short.avi For this shooting gallery gameplay, %age of destruction on structures, specifically the pillars, is actually what drove the encounter And in general, enemies would spend lots of time behind cover, maximizing potential for player initiative through destructibility A more extreme example is..
- So, destructibility can be taken much further, as with the environmental destruction system in the Red Faction games, and DICE's Bad Company series
- I'm not going to spend time talking about this, as there's a whole talk about this at this year's GDC, on Friday From destructibility, we move on to..
- Which have become a staple of shooters for years, in no small part due to...
- Boom And they're everywhere!
- Here are some Japanese barrels in MoH
- a random, lonely barrel in BF2
- And even in in the combat zones of the future, people are leaving explosive barrels around! This is from BF 2142 Now, watching MythBusters will tell you this is all incredibly unrealistic, but it makes for effective gameplay as the environment feels reactive to the player when it largely isn't Explosives are just a simple of example of an
- A well known game that features more complex examples is...
- bioshock1-short.avi Here we see that water transmits electric current
- bioshock3-short.avi And this is somewhat similar to electricity, but fire is a different system, in that it can just be on a floor rather than a pool, and is a DoT effect that will last for a while after being triggered One game took this particular concept further..
- farcry2.avi The elemental fire system touched every asset in the game, and roads and rocks had to be laid out particularly with this in mind The lesson here is you should understand emergence to help control it, and use it to your advantage
- These guys know how, read these And for a quick non-shooter example
- So, I go into a store Imperial City
- I just want to sell some warez Gee those are really shiny loots in the case in front of this guy, but he'll probably get pissed if I try to take them in front of his face
- But I've figured out previously that the game has a day and night cycle, so maybe I can come back when he's asleep...
- Loots are mine! I've been drawn into the game's systems in a very subtle manner, and quickly get a sense of accomplishment. Then I see in the corner there, that this stuff is kinda crappy, and I wonder if I can have some retribution for my time wasted... So maybe I kill the shopkeeper in his sleep, and Welcome to the Dark Brotherhood, one of the coolest questlines in the game And now, for something completely different
- We'll start with
- Then the more modern.. Asymmetrical layouts
- Then look at some.. Balancing methods
- So, starting with.. Symmetrical layouts
- They are.. Inherently balanced
- Big shocker, it kind of goes with the name.. but
- Here's an example from one of my favourite games evar...
- I'm going to do a quick examination of DM6; DM6 is loosely symmetrical, but it's the items within the level alter this symmetry, and give it a flow
- Here's the red armor area This is the area to dominate, with the highest power offensive and defensive pickups in one location. At the start of a match, everybody races here. If you're second here, you normally fall back, and the level provides some other options..
- There's another rocket launcher, and with the uber healthn, but the health powerup doesn't respawn as quickly, which makes this a secondary location, and the most obvious place to be hunted by the person who got the red armor
- But there are more options, such as the lighter armor
- The grenade launcher, which a trickier weapon to use, but also located on high ground
- Or the Electricity gun, which is a powerful, but using the teleporters can give away your location Now that we've seen how elements within a roughly symmetrical level can create interesting gameplay, it leads us to.. Asymmetrical layout
- They are... Inherently un-balanced
- Like, duh! They need to rely more on.. Overall movement times
- It's good to keep in mind that it's trickier to balance movement times with height variation, especially if there are differing velocities for going up vs down So, remember to know your game's movement mechanics Another balancing agent can be.. objectives
- Also can typically feature objectives
- Asymmetrical game design will always make for asymmetrical levels A classic example of a asymmetrical layout, for a rather popular game ..
- I'll be talking specifically about... de_dust
- Which is recognized as one of the most popular levels evar
- So, here it is! In CS, movement time to collision areas between teams is absolutely critical, as it favours one-shot initial rush gameplay, rather than instant respawns
- If you want to read more about how Dust came about, read about it here. But, things can get a lot more complicated, especially with.. Asymmetrical multiplayer game design.
- A close to home example is.. ETQW
- Which is very asymmetrical in vehicles, weapons and abilities
- It seems simple enough, one side attacking (Strogg), one side defending (GDF)
- But here's the faction and class progression chart, and these are the asymmetrical elements:
- This proved extremely difficult to balance, and it's no coincidence that with Brink we've backed away from this level of asymmetry We found that in ETQW, the more competitive maps tended to be the ones with lesser vehicular components, as the gameplay was both more focused and more balanced So now, a few words about.. Balancing methods
- How do we achieve balance?.. playtests
- This one is hopefully a truth that is somewhat self-evident.. play it! .stats
- So, regarding playtests..
- I'm not actually going to talk about this, because a great hour long lecture last year covered it in far more depth, and it's available on Valve's website. Moving on to stats, and speaking of Valve, there's a great resource..
- Here are the overall %ages for win/loss in TF2, though this pic a bit dated They also provide heatmaps, such as this one for Goldrush..
- You can see there's an obviously unbalanced point... it could be seen within the map to those with knowledge, but this proof can be invaluable, as it's tangible proof Though this particular issue has been fixed since this heatmap was made Another great resource on the web is provided by Bungie..
- They're similar looking heatmaps, but they've made filters available..
- So you can filter by weapon.. say Sniper rifle, and see the firing locations that resulted in kills. Or conversely,
- Where the people shot by snipers got pwned
- If you want more, you're in luck... go to this talk on Thursday!