Questions from Damion

A few days ago I had an email form a guy named Damion who had a couple of questions regarding my workflow when I do levels. I've seen these questions come up quite often on various level design communities and decided to write my own opinions regarding those. Here are the questions and answers:

When your to create an enviroment what is your work flow?

irst off, I always keep timeframe in mind very carefully even in the very beginning. How much time is available completely determines how much time i can spend on each phase. It also completely determines wether I have time to make any assets of my own at all!

The more time I have at hand, the more time I will spend doing research, prototyping and art-passes. If there is very little time I would probably cut the resarch and prototyping first, sadly because most people probably only will judge you by the art and composition. I hate things are this way, but hey, thats how it is.

Pure research

If I'm to make.. Lets say counter-strike level and have no deadline and can really take the time i want i would go like this:

First I make sure I know the game both game play-wise and art-wise from the inside out. I dissect the official levels, measure time from spawn to hot-spots on each official level and compare them. Are the timings similar? If not, then why?

I study layouts ,mapsizes and other characteristics of Counter-Strike. How many entrances from the counter-terrorist side does a bomb-site usually have in CS?

As i know there are plenty of really good articles about making level for counter-strike for example "bens small bible to realistic multiplayer level design" (http://sandbox.vrmedialab.dk/files/Bens_Small_Bible_of_Realistic_Multiplayer_Level_Design.pdf), i also would take time to read as many of the good ones as i could. I'd also have a look at mapping profiles such as the DaveJ (http://www.johnsto.co.uk/) and read what he has to say as well as the articles he promotes.

Then i play the levels a couple of hours every day until i know how players utilize the environment and the flow of the game very well. Then I start to take a close look at the different themes available for counter-strike. What assets and textures are there? What themes do i find interesting?

Putting first idea on paper & prototyping

I then start to make my own layout with the theme i I'd like to make and determine a map-size. How many players should this level fit for? will it be a harbour, hotel or a warehouse setting? When that is decided a quickly draw a rough sketch on paper following the guidelines i have come up with as i read the articles and researched all the official levels. I usually don't spend too much time on the sketching phase as most usually the proportions will be screwed up as you create a 3D prototype of your 2D sketch and will have to change lots of stuff anyway. The first prototype i make has NO DETAILS, NO ART WHATSOEVER. Its a big uggly piece of grey and orange textures and simply looks like crap (have a look at the dec_boulevard video and youll see what I mean as i show the iterations of the level). But does it play like crap? I compile the level, run it through and make sure the timings fits with what the official levels has.

I then test my prototype with my friends. The first play test should take place only one or two days after the layout has been drafted to make sure I dont spend too much time tweaking or putting details. Why? Cause you have no idea how a map will play until you test it for the first time! When the prototype is done I test the level.

Gather a bunch of people who like the game, let them play the level through until they don't feel like it anymore and study how they play the level.

When conducting the playtest I try to listen to the testers spontaneous reactions and what they say as they play rather than what they answer when I ask them questions. The spontaneous things are most often more accurate and honest than if you give them a specific question about the layout since most testers really don't want to hurt your feelings or don't really know why the dislike the level. The spontaneous reactions can sometimes give hints about what is wrong. The feedback from the testers is your most valuable resource and make sure that the testers know you appreciate their opinions and how valuable they are to you.

After you conducted your first playtest and gathered feedback I'd go back to the drawing board again and start evaluating the feedback. What can be kept, and what needs to be changed/removed?

I remember testing my first prototype of the current project I'm developing called "The Technodome" an abstract Half-Life 2 Deathmatch level with a 2 month time frame. The test was being conducted only one day after the first draft had been drawn. Before the playtest i thought i had made a really good layout with all the ingredients needed for a great flow. It turned out I was terribly wrong. The testers hated it. They didn't bother to play more than 10 minutes before quitting in pure frustration. I then asked each one of them what they thought was wrong and how i could improve it. I became clear that I had gotten the whole thing wrong. The ingredients i thought was valuable in fact wasn't! I re-defined the important pieces and rules needed to create a good layout by reading more articles and then keeping what was good and throwing out what was bad, in this case, most of it was.

After you have changed all the things you think was wrong its time to test again with friends and collect their feedback. I usually re-do this cycle as many times that are needed until everyone seems to be happy and has fun while playing.

I then start with art and lighting. when doing this i work iteratively meaning i don't focus all of my energy on one area and forget about the rest. I do art passes over the whole level one pass at a time. I occasionally play test the level during this phase to make sure i don't add stuff that ruins the experienec as well as collect feedback about the artistic stuff ive added. When i add my own content I never make a model straight from scratch, model it, texture it and then put it into the engine. During that process i could have made several mistakes that leads to the model not fitting into the environment at all. Instead i would create many rough models without textures and put them into the environment to make sure everything works in relation to everything else before i start texturing. Again, working with iterations and with several models in parallel makes the end result much more coherent.

As the project starts to getting finished its time to start playtesting as much as its physically possible again. Now I would look for bugs, quirks and other issues that only can be found when playing. I'd also ask friends to help out looking for bugs.

When your creating a building, do you do so from reference?

I almost always use some sort of reference, but depending on what im doing and what artistic freedom I have I base my creations more or less on the references.

For example, when creating the boulevard (http://filip.coulianos.se/bilder/boulevard/boulevard_head_developer_video.jpg) the big parliament building is based upon several real parliament buildings around the world i found when simply using google image search. I took different details from each building that i found interesting and characteristic and made a fictional parliament building based upon those. That is mostly how I and my friends worked when making props, environments or whatever for Decadence; we picked interesting details from a bunch of reference images and then put the details together and created something of our own.

But sometimes you find something that would really fit as a whole. Another building I made for the very same level (http://filip.coulianos.se/bilder/other/ruined_building.jpg) is entirely based upon a photograph from a bombed ww2 building I found on the internet.

When doing dm_tech (http://filip.coulianos.se/bilder/dm_tech/dm_tech_head.jpg) i looked very closely at the architecture from Quake 4 and what sort of details, lighting and such they used when making the game, took inspiration from that and created a sci-fi environment on my own.

When developing Project 25 (http://filip.coulianos.se/bilder/project25/head_thumb_video.jpg) one of my main goals was to create something that was very, very similar to the Half-Life 2 experience. Therefore i collected 100's of reference images from the game, and even decompiled some levels to see how they did lighting, composition, detail and such.