Fishing Cactus development blog » Game Design

Behind the Level Design of Shift 2

Samuel Languy — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:10:30 +0000

Yes, you heard me, that’s what I’m talking about. The Level Design process of Shift 2 levels.

Who knows? We might have something related in developement…

Let’s face it, designing batches of dozen and dozen levels while keeping our beloved player entertained can be tricky. So here are some tips and tricks we use in the making of the levels for our unique platformer (as a reminder created by Anthony Lavelle and Armor Games).

Evolution

While Shift 1 was featuring only 2 kind of level elements (doors and spikes) Shift 2 is featuring brand new elements which greatly improve the level design possibilities, hence, player experience. Let’s have a quick look at those.

Rotators:

This feature is a trigger represented by a 4 direction arrow placed on any simple black or white tile. If the player walks on it, the level rotates in that direction.

It is a very big change that introduces 2 new ways of seeing the level for a player. It also allows the design of much more aerial/platform-oriented levels, in which the player has to gracefully jump back and forth, avoiding deadly spikes while being rotated at each landing. Lot of fun in perspective !

Shift impermeable material:

This level element creates platforms which are not black or white, hence impossible to shift!

Impermeable material disolver:

This bonus goes with the previous, picking it up will transform a non-shiftable material that the designer has preset into a black or white shiftable square.

Customisable door:

We can now set 5 different lengths for the door. Yay! It means that it is possible to think of much cooler dynamic mazes using the doors to block or open path.

Design process

Let’s see what we got now… Design process, or how to use all the elements we talked about in order to create fun, challenging, and varied levels.

Find a base to start with:

It is nearly impossible to think of a Shift 2 level in one shot. Something will most probably go wrong and you’ll find yourself with a level impossible to finish, or really easy to exploit. As it is really difficult to plan out a level straight ahead, it is better off to start with a base. It can be some randomly placed platforms or a simple layout or a theme (such as the aerial level, for instance). Better not place any special elements such as door or rotators yet and keep them for the end.

Iteration:

It is common to almost every design process (be it game or level): Think about what you want to do, do it, test, redo, test, redo so on so forth until you have a satisfying result. The “redo” basically means to implement new elements if you have new ideas while testing, or fix the level (difficulties, impossibility to finish, exploits etc…). If you think you are done do not forget to have your levels tested by another person! At Fishing Cactus we have several designers and most of them will test your level at will. Of course once this step is done, the good thing to do is to playtest them with a completely unfamilliar tester (this is what we do when we externally playtest the game). By the way if you’d like to become a playtester for our games, stay updated we are currently setuping the playtest web form for you to register.

Design tips and tricks

Now here are just some hints on how to spice up a level. Some ideas to compose with, of course there is no special alchemy that works 100% of time.

Foresight:

When you design a level it is important to always foresee what will happen in the game. When you place a new element for any reason, always check if you do not block a previous step of your level. It can save you some time of test! For instance, a door once rotated can easily block a previous path you had setup.

Action repetition:

Get the player to perform the same action over and over for few seconds, like “jump+forward”. Doing so generally introduces a “robot” rhythm and the awareness of the player goes down, a good time to set a trap that will remind the player to stay alert! In a nice and not too frustrating manner of course . But what would be a puzzle/platform game without a whee bit of frustration?

Obvious path:

The obvious path is a way you can set the level to suggest a path to the player with subtlety. An open way with a useless bonus which is in fact a deadly trap is easier to go for the player than analyzing the possible paths if he would shift. Using rotators arrow can also be a nice trick, because of the directional aspect of the element, players are more tempted to follow the direction.

Surprises:

The surprise element is always good to have. In Shift 2 you can create such effects pretty easily as the player never knows what will change in a level when he picks up a key or a dissolver bonus. Example: you can push the player to a “leap of faith” where he has to take a chance jump right towards spikes, but there is a bonus to catch during the fall! It might save him, a door could turn and create a platform right above the spikes. Or not.

Confuse the player:

Using the dissolvers and keys you can literally transform the structure of the level. Now add the rotators and you will confuse the player so well that he will have the impression he is playing a new level.

Variations:

There are various other little ways of creating fun and various level. From real puzzle to pure platform, Shift 2 is really a nice game to develop level on! Do not forget to add some pure fun level (easy to do, but fun theme) to give the player some rest once in a while and you are good to go!

Contest?

You’ll get more information about this one soon enough

AiGameDev Conference 2010: EVE Online Characters

christophe.bernard — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:44:45 +0000

UPDATE: post is now under the right author name.

During the AiGameDev Conference 2010 at Paris Claudio Pedica, a researcher at CADIA Labs, Reykjavik University, currently collaborating with CCP Games presented us their new social interaction system in a talk titled Human Territoriality for EVE Online’s Socially Smart Characters.

This was a short preview on how the space stations are going to be populated in the next EVE online expansion.

The main focus of the research conducted by CCP is based on the lack of feedback in games when it comes to interactions. For example if you pass besides a game character, he doesn’t notice you or in worse cases, if you bump into him, the most common reaction is that he won’t even step aside and your character stops dumbly like when facing a wall! Fortunately, not all games react like this. In GTA when you hit someone or pass close to him he steps aside or even says something to you.

What the guys at CCP are trying to do is to recreate an interaction system based on how humans practically cope with interactions and how they react to other people’s physical presence.

In the demos shown we could see the character move close to a group of NPCs; when close enough, the group understands that this character wants to be part of their group so they take a step aside to form a bigger but still homogeneous group.

The “circle” itself is, in this system, the interaction unit; each character and group possesses one and each unit is designed for a particular type of interaction.

1) First there is the personal circle which defines the limit of the body area.

2) The external circle is used for the close social interactions like dialogs or people walking near (also true for groups).

3) An inner circle is also defined by the participants of the group: a circle defines its body and the external circle of it. In another example we saw one participant moving a few steps from his former position and the rest of the group following him to recreate the circle.

I actually don’t play EVE Online at all and I don’t really know what they are planning to do with the new space stations system but having this feature is über-cool and I think it would really improve the experience of the players (at least contributing to a more immersive experience).

Having people walking from one spot to another or joining conversations or even reacting to the players’ presence will surely make us feel more in a real living world. When you think that some games only feature static NPCs, this talk gets even more impressing!

Human Territoriality for EVE Online’s Socially Smart Characters by Claudio Pedica can be downloaded from the AiGameDev website.

Virtual Characters AI at Paris AiGameDev Conference

Andrea Di Stefano — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:10:52 +0000

Last week, part of our team had the chance to attend the AI game dev conference in Paris. This world renowned conference is mostly the result of AiGameDev.com Alex and Petra Champandard’s hard work. Big thanks to them then! Everyone on the team that attended the conference will discuss the conference talks in the coming week or so, but let me tell that these covered a very large breadth of topics ranging from high level inspirational design panels to down to the nuts and bolts of making AI characters behave smarter and more interestingly.

Hey, that's us!

On my part, I’ll spend this post writing about the conference keynote that I found to be both interesting and inspirational; this talk by Bruce Blumberg was titled “Intimate Conversations with Interactive Animated Characters”.

Bruce Blumberg’s is the director of the Synthetic Characters Group at MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge and is in charge of the Synthetic Animal Team at Blue Fang Studios, developers of World of Zoo (from here on, WoZ) on the Wii and PC. More importantly, Blumberg’s been working on virtual pet’s AI for several years now and he is considered one of the world’s leading experts in the field! Also, he showcased an abstract virtual dog made of simple geometric shapes, and I swear that thing behaved like a real dog! Amazing!

Mr.Blumberg’s talk focused on detailing his work on virtual pet’s AI throughout the years on WoZ and on what it means to create a relationship between the player and a virtual pet. What distinguishes a good pet game from a bad one? How is it that for some virtual pets we end up caring about and other we just leave them dying (when we’re not killing them ourselves)?

The presentation showed how iterative his work has been, from über-computer simulations to expo installations and videogames. At one moment, a video showed an audience reacting to a “alpha wolf”, a wolf puppy simulation: the reactions were astonishing, people wooow-ed and aaahhh-ed almost like during an interaction with an actual pet!

So, what are the secret ingredients Mr.Blumberg mentioned?

The need to create a “conversation” between the player and the pet, the two need to understand each other, interpret each other’s behaviors and attitudes.

The player needs to feel that HE is the center of attention, that the virtual pet is dependent on him to survive/learn/evolve! A clear example: when a dog comes to you holding a stick and asking you to throw it, basically the dog is asking “I need you to play my game, otherwise I’ll be bored” (close enough anyway). Thus, thanks to its owner, the dog is happy and the owner is gratified.

Obviously, the pet’s behavior needs to be coherent and pertinent; but more precisely, to put it in Mr.Blumberg’s words, it needs to exhibit attention, engagement, and sentience. Basically, you don’t want a pet that doesn’t acknowledge the player’s role, ignores the player altogether or even acts bored to the player’s input!

I’ll be honest, I had very little time to play World of Zoo but from what I experienced, and despite the game being targeted at a young audience (gameplay is fairly simple), the animal’s behavior were incredibly funny to watch and at no moment I had the impressions to be in front of a “mere” AI. Also, kudos to the wonderful art design (very Wind Waker-y)! All-in-all, it all felt very…natural!

Finally, let me add that Bruce Blumberg is an incredibly talented speaker (like all the other American speakers at the conference, that’s an odd pattern!) who managed to entertain and impress throughout his talk! I hope I’ll have the chance to attend another one of his lectures.

That’s it! Here’s hoping for a chance to work on something involving virtual pets one day, as I believe that they can make for very compelling games or at least, turn any game-world into a far more exciting place to be!

The Quest for the perfect design tool!

Bruno Urbain — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:15:07 +0000

As designers we are always looking for the best tool to communicate our ideas. At Fishing Cactus we always try to come up with collaborative solutions and we try to keep the following motto: “not make a 100 pages design document”. Instead we try to find solutions to keep the design document light and readable for different audiences. Managers want to have an overview of the game in order to evaluate scope. Programmers want to have a clear understanding of the mechanic they have to implement and game designers want to know how a mechanic works with another. Most of the time all these people are looking for either a very detailed aspect of the game or a big overview.

All design documents are living pieces, changes in scope and gameplay mechanics occur more than once in the lifespan of a game project. Also there are different types of design documents: game concept, game treatment, one pager, game design document, game backlog (if you are using SCRUM). Also, a variety of production documents is generated as the design undergoes implementation (asset lists for one, localization texts list and so on…).

For a designer, managing those different aspects quickly becomes tidy work and is bound to require a great amount of time. Ultimately, we spend literally days and weeks maintaining the documentation. But that’s not the only problem we spotted. Here is a list of elements we think can be improved:

- Maintenance (time cost and ease of use)
- History (versioning)
- Rich text editing (often needs using code tags) with embeddable content
- Collaborative tool (invite other designers or even other persons to join the discussion)
- Moderating (content supervision)
- Search / Indexation issues
- File organization
- Dedicated sections for dedicated usages (Brainstorm meeting, Sprint review)
- Profiling of game design elements (who worked on what)
- Structured overview of the above information
- Relation between causes and effects (a brainstorm meeting changed that X mechanic on the game)
- Data mining for lists (sound, localization, animations, art assets)
- Scalability of the document (regarding the reader, scope)
- Define the granularity of information (regarding scope and so on)
- Keeping track of outdated content (reminder)
- Keeping the team informed of the meaningful changes in real time (regarding what they implemented previously)

This is why we started here a small discussion around a dedicated designer tool to remove some hurdles from our daily work.

It is also worth noting that we’re discussing a tool that would be used internally and would not be suited for producing presentation documents for clients and business partners (but an export feature could allow for raw content to be reorganized and on which you can add extra eye candy to make the documents more sexy).

Let’s talk about it!

We’re starting this thread hoping to have some constructive input about what designers always dreamed of for their work tools. So let’s share some info and not forget that sizes and configuration of a game developer company can vary widely. Not to mention project scope.

Leave your thoughts in the comments and feel free to point out relevant discussions that could bring new data to our analysis. A lot of industry people talk about this constantly on several sites, forums, conversations, but it seems to us that no existing or non-existing tool to rule them all has emerged.

What we’re asking here is to think about what you’d love to see in the ultimate design tool and to what problematics it should bring answers to. And talk about it

What we think about:

Google Wave

Google Wave has arrived (in an ever-evolving beta form) and as usual, public opinion is fairly divided about it. But how does Google Wave fare as a game design tool?

We started using Google Wave as soon as beta invitations were sent out and we started thinking about ways to put it to good use. Below is a list of Wave features and their relevance to our design process.

Creating/Removing Waves: Anyone can create a Wave and share it, but removing is impossible. When a Wave is removed from a Wave client, other followers still have access to it. It is like having an old outdated document lying around and just waiting to mess things up. This leads to a bigger issues, the need for some form of content moderation and data structuring: you know, creating folders to put specifics waves in, moving Waves around to organize them. Presently, these operations only affect the precise client that triggered the change, leaving the other follower clients unchanged.

Graphic interface: Wave’s interface is far from perfect (and surely far from final) but it’s still fairly easy to add/edit content. As soon as a Wave gets longer though, content gets hard to find and structuring information becomes almost impossible (you can’t move blips, Wave’s contents, once they are created).

Ease of sharing and collaborating: It is extremely easy to invite and share content with other Wave users. Being able to edit all the content and following discussions or when you have an idea or suggestion is undoubtedly a great feature. On the contrary, having no way (at present at least) to remove people from a Wave can really be a problem for those company paying a lot of attention to secrecy. The case we have here is that some people left the company and still have access to some confidential content and although we trust our guys, we can see this being a huge problem.

Changes history (playback button): This is a great feature that lets you playback all the changes that have been made to a Wave. It’s really useful to track/review changes as a whole but also acts as a major “undo” function.

Real-time messaging: This is advertised as a world-changing feature but we fail to see how this feature serves us (we are already using IM systems). More so, this has zero relevance in our work context. Next!

Embeddable media and gadgets: This feature isn’t used often (embedding images and textual content in document is a feature we’ve come to expect as standard) but we had a case when embedding YouTube videos was nice. We had to provide a quick list of small “high concepts” for a potential partner and each people on the design team could add theirs. Embedding videos was a nice, quick way of proving the concept by showing similar games or visual inspirations (and video work better than pictures which work better than text). This allowed us to spend less time trying to understand the concepts and reviewing them and going directly to the selection process.

Document uploading: We thought this was great. Always having the latest document version up on the wave for everyone to have access to. Unfortunately this leads to the usual maintenance chores as someone needs to keep track of all the document revision/changes. Also, the document being not directly editable this means that people have to download the document, modify it and upload it back. Not very efficient. And Google Docs integration is terribly poor at the moment (even with the iFrame gadget).

Conclusions:

While Google Wave has some nice features, we don’t see it as a long-lasting tool for game designers. It proves useful to keep track of ideas, sum up brainstorms, share information and references not to get lost.

Unfortunately, as soon as things get serious (as in “the game is actually being produced, wohooo!”), Wave usage is limited (at best) to keep track of ideas a little more easily and flexibly that with a forum or a wiki.

Feel free to comment.

Article written by Andrea Distefano and Bruno Urbain.