Currently working over various sections of the alpha level again.
Turns out having a ranked list of your spells actually has a profound and positive impact on level design.
The mentioned design workflow is a bastardization of
Feature-Driven-Development, where you describe the features of a software product through a triplet <<action><object>::<result>> (e.g. "<Set> <the profile picture of an account>::<new profile picture>" etc)
For game design this means that objects are entities within the world that have a simulation aspect. Most prominentily enemies and doors, but also puzzle mechanisms and other parts of the environment.
Actions on the other hand are anything the player (or some other entity) can do within the world. From simple stuff like moving forward to more complex stuff like setting a trap (which can again be an entity in itself).
The catalyst for these actions - whether it is casting a spell or using an item or just pressing a button on the keyboard - is absolutely secondary.
Now technically you could take every entity/object in the game and list all their actions and create a HUGE table on the results these actions would cause with every other entity/object.
But since that table will likely end up way too large it's sufficient to do that with the player actions. More precisely with the major game changing ones, i.e. spells, attacks and item combinations.
Now obviously such a table comes in very handy when we're talking about level design, since it provides you with a catalogue of "features" you can methodically stuff into a level, respectively a subsection.
In effect this means a fully gameplay-driven level design, which is very much like Ultima Underworld 2's design philosophy. In fact, that game was so focused on gameplay-driven level design, that it sometimes abandoned the concept of a cohesive world and essentially provided you with a set of "challenge rooms". This becomes the most obvious in the academy level, which in my opinion is - ironically - also one of the weaker levels, since the more abstract game design concepts, like exploration, take the backseat there.
So you gotta be careful with that whole idea of building your levels entirely around that feature catalogue.
Nevertheless, the catalogue is still very useful since it provides you with cornerstones while designing a level subsection.
A while ago I mentioned two general problems I had with level design:
[...] You can technically merge these concepts, by designing many interlinked horseshoes resulting in a sort of pseudo-open area. Or you make one open area and tack on the horseshoes. Or you do some other sort of combination, but the question is, whether the result can still carry over the strengths of its inspirations (all of which are highly abstract - cause, for example, what is "rewarding" exploration?). That in itself is experimental already, but fitting it into gameplay-driven design is another story - which is essentially necessary, cause otherwise you'll just have a nicely arranged set of hallways with nothing to do in them.
[...] I will probably modularize level sections more clearly during design in the future. I can still link them together later (according to that whole horseshoe/open level strategy).
With the list of spells I came to the conclusion that during the on-paper-design-phase of a level (so before even touching anything in-engine) you can follow an eight step process:
- Find the theme (e.g. cave/ruin/castle/sewer - maybe add an adjective like "flooded mine" or "haunted ruins" or everyone's favorite "poisoned sewer")
- Come up with around 4 or 5 locations for that theme (e.g. the throne room or the prospectors' quarters, the kitchen or a hall for rituals, etc)
- Get down a rough look: For every location make a small drawing - scribblings are fine; this shouldn't take you much longer than 10 minutes
- Come up with a list of things people can or could do in these locations (mine for ore, ride a minecart, cook in the kitchen, catch a fish in a lake yadda yadda yadda). This is a brainstorming process. Just write down anything you can come up with. Now you got a list of actions and objects again. You can already see where this is going.
- Now take all locations and assign them with a couple of these actions/objects (like three per location should be fine). Ideally these actions/objects are already covered by the feature catalogue mentioned above. However this is not a given thing. We are going at the problem from the other side. As opposed to UU2's academy level. On the other hand this means that we may have to complement our catalogue with new actions/objects. Which of course means additional work.
- Now you can go crazy and design actual small maps for the locations. And you can design those with the assigned features in mind. So the result becomes more than just a pretty hallway. And what you can also do now is applying the horseshoe principle of level design, or the open design as you see fit, as long as you design around the features you first assigned. You'll find very soon that the whole process kinda develops its own dynamics, because you realize that certain features in certain places also imply other features that automatically come along. For example you design, let's say a room with a door that can be lockpicked - if your feature catalogue also provides destructible doors this automatically means there are already two solutions for the problem - if there are explosive barrels behind the door, you got three, but only if you have a way of blowing them up etc etc. So as you can see, you automatically develop a much greater design than what you originally prepared for a single location.
- Once you're done with your locations you can connect them through a hub, horseshoe or onion skin layout however you see fit.
- In the end you can polish over the whole thing, with location-spanning challenges, mini-storylines or connected puzzles. You can also go crazy on the connections between your locations. This is essentially a entirely separate design pass, because you can apply the same principles of feature driven design on an higher layer. Say, you have a feature in one location that opens a door in another location, which leads you again to another location. Classic example: The floodgate scenario where you look for the maintenance room, open the gate, and then dive through the flooded room to a higher room that could not be reached before.
And this is how I do it now.
You can btw also use this design process to quickly come up with areas for pen & paper games. In fact let's come up with something right now:
- Theme: Haunted Church
- Locations: Tomb, Hall, Belltower
- Look: (You know how these things look like)
- List of actions/objects: People could go there and ring the bell, climb the tower, read a sermon, pray, visit the dead, wake up the dead, get eaten by the dead, banish the dead, sprinkle holy water on themself and others, bury people, find hidden secrets about the priest, talk to ghosts, steal holy artifacts, loot graves, dig up graves, read about what caused the curse, lift the curse, etc etc
- Assign Locations/Features: Tomb: Dig up the dead, get eaten by the dead, find hidden secrets about the priest // Hall: read a sermon, steal holy artifacts, read what caused the curse // Belltower: Ring the bell, lift the curse, talk to (bell tower) ghost -- As you can see this step can also be helpful for establishing a gameplay driven story ... so much about gameplay hindering writers by the way. They are just going at it from the wrong end if you ask me.
- Design Maps: (Again, you know how these areas could look like layout wise - the tomb could have a natural cave in it, that allows for digging, it could be a maze with zombies walking around - the belltower might have broken stairs the require you to climb etc etc)
- Connect Locations: You can connect these areas through a courtyard for example.
- Polish: In the court yard there could be a hidden entrance to the tomb, which may be under the hall - the belltower could be locked, the key may be somewhere in the tomb
And before you know it you get something that's very close to Thief's "Return to the Haunted Cathedral" - which wasn't even my intention, but since that's one of my favorite missions I might be subconsciously biased.
Either way - I believe it's a solid approach. Unfortunately the alpha level doesn't fully subscribe to this principle and feels a little rough in some places - which is, why I am working over parts. Probably not everything though. The region in the screenshot from the tweet is in fact one location with several features.
In the future I'll probably go entirely with this process, so writing it down properly actually helps a lot.
