Inspired by my recent Beyond Belief retrospective, Negke decided to combine all Beyond Belief SP levels and combine them into one large map. The content is ultimately unchanged, but it’s neat to see the entire episode stitched together this way! You’ll need a modern Quake engine port to play this, of course.
As a direct follow-up to my 2012 talk “Player Stories and Designer Stories”, this GDC lecture delves deeply into the oft-repeated, but rarely explored game design concept of “interesting decisions”. Meaningful choice is the foundation of good game design, but there is a surprising amount of ambiguity surrounding the topic. This lecture explores when decisions are meaningful to the brain, ties that reasoning into the biology and psychology of why decisions matter in real life (and why we play games as a result), and then uses Doom 2 combat as a case study for how Systemic Agency (a concept established in my 2012 talk) is created, which leads to interesting low-level gameplay.
Back in 2008, I got the Quake editing bug again: I wasn’t doing any level design at work at the time, it had been over 10 years since Beyond Belief had been released, and the Olympic Summer Games were on TV (I made some of my Doom levels while watching the Olympics, so there was some nostalgia there). So I embarked on Beyond Belief 2008 – my revisit to the days of old Quake editing.
The whole map was an exercise in “What If?”, and informed by my much improved understanding of game design and how systems design and level design interact. Quake didn’t have many strong connections between multiple runtime systems, but the zombie enemy type was one of them (it could only be killed in very specific ways, most notably the rocket and grenade launchers). What if neither of these weapons were given when the first zombies were introduced to the game? What inventive ways are there to still dispatch of these zombies? To my knowledge, no Quake level had ever explored this question. Well, BBelief2008 does!
My 2013 GDC lecture explores computer games’ place in the cultural landscape. As developers and players, we hear comparisons between movies and games all the time, and we are still heavily influenced by the way in which movies (and books) have shaped our expectations for storytelling, authorship, and even our very patterns of thinking. But it turns out that computer games are not a direct continuation of that media lineage, and that the era of authoritative entertainment that books and movies represent is presently being replaced by a new cultural age that is much more complex than the one that came before. My lecture extrapolates those findings into hands-on advice on everyday problems faced by level and narrative designers, and explains in detail how computer games are the perfect expression of our current cultural values; an age that is commonly referred to as Secondary Orality.
Games are inherently participatory. That interactive nature is the reason for why we play games, and it’s how computer games are powerfully different from all other media. But whose story does a game tell? That of the player, the game character, or the designer? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, and this lecture provides a review of how games create narrative by structuring designer and player stories through level design.
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 GDC talk looks at how we reconcile 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 don’t 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.
This in an introductory look at the world of level design that I presented at the first Level Design in a Day tutorial at GDC 2010. It looks at what a level designer does and how she does it. The material is entry level, but I tried to provide a good overview of the disciplines. There is some overlap You with the level definitions that Harvey and I used in our “What Happened Here?” session.
If you’re interested, you can download the slides for this session here (PowerPoint 2007 .pptx, 4.5MB)
This lecture, which I presented together with Harvey Smith at the GDC 2010, examines the game environment as a narrative device, with a focus on further involving the player in interpreting (or pulling) information, in opposition to traditional fictional exposition. Harvey and I provide an analysis of how and why some games in particular create higher levels of immersion and consistency, and we propose ways in which dynamic game systems can be used to expand upon these techniques. The lecture presents the techniques for environmental storytelling, the key to the creation of game spaces with an inherent sense of history; game spaces that invite the player’s mind to piece together implied events and to infer additional layers of depth and meaning. In addition to commonly-used environmental storytelling tools (such as props, scripted events, texturing, lighting and scene composition), we present ideas for using game systems to convey narrative through environmental reaction. Environmental storytelling engages the player as an active participant in narrative; game systems that reflect the player’s agency can do the same. The lecture will analyze existing cases and provide a framework for dynamic environmental storytelling in games.
This is an unfinished (but fully playable) Unreal 2 level (based on the PC Games tutorial I wrote in 2003) that I released to the community. No scripting or particle effects, but the map is fully playable and provides at least 30 minutes of gameplay. See if you can find all secret areas, there’s three dead hidden scientists! More information can be found in the Solaris Base readme.
The 9-level SP episode for Quake that got me my first job in the gaming industry. Back in its days this got over 10000 downloads in the first two days. There’s also various speedruns available. Start map, seven regular levels and a secret map. More information and links to level reviews can be found on Quaddicted.
