This is the summary of Emilio Padulo's Level Design Master Class.
· Questions
1. Questions
· What is the goal of the Level？
· What is the playtime of the level?
· Where is it situated?
· What NMEs are introduced already?
1/ What is the goal of the Level?
· The Main OCR of the level is what?
· Basically this is the part where we break up the map into sections that we want to player to go through.
· Each section has some sort of Narrative elemnt or objective.
· The player must complete it to move on if its linear.
· If it’s non-Linear, the player must do X amount of objectives to move on.
· For our level we will do a linear map.
· We break it up into 5 Sections “OCRs”
1. Find Compass
2. Destroy Power Grid
3. Release Prisoners
4. Retrieve Key
5. Destroy Watch Tower
2/ What is the playtime of the level?
· So when it comes to deciding how long a level takes to complete.
· This is done through rigorous playtesting, but as a Level designer, we can make assumptions.
· To gage how long a level will take, we assign time values to very rudimentary activities. This is done usually in Excel.
· With this we can estimate how long it will take to complete a Level.
· What Activities do we have?
1. Find Compass
2. Destroy Power Grid
3. Release Prisoners
4. Retrieve Key
5. Destroy Watch Tower
We will calculate the entire playtime of the level when we do our Diagram later on in this lecture.
3/ Where is it situated
· This is typically where is the map located in the game.
· Is it the 1st level? 3rd? Final?!?!
· This is important to know. Based on where the level is situated in the grand scpoe of the game, the pacing, balancing of NMEs and difficulty must be tuned perfectly.
· For Our level, it will be the 2nd one.
· The player will have already been introduced to some of the mechanics such as puzzles and fighting.
· Therefore we can’t make it overlay difficult. In order to do this, we must again have a level design breakdown for the difficulty.
· We will assume that there are 2 main activities that have difficulty breakdowns.
· NMEs
· Puzzles
4/ What NMEs and Puzzles are introduced already
· Feeding off the last question, having a breakdown is crucial to know what difficulty the previous level was and build on that.
· For that reason we will look at our Breakdown.
Lets say for argument that the following NME and Puzzles were used in Level 1.
· 1 X Easy Puzzle
· 2 X Medium Puzzle
· 2 X NME Melee 1
· 1 X NME Melee 2
· 1 X NME Caster 1
· 1 X NME Caster 3
The Breakdown would look like this
Now Since the level 1 showcased these elements, we can use some and introduce new ones at the same time.
· For our Level we will introduce the following elements:
· 2 X Easy Puzzle
· 1 X Medium Puzzle
· 1 X NME Melee 1
· 2 X NME Melee 2
· 1 X NME Melee 3
· 1 X NME Caster 1
· 2 X NME Caster 2
For the sake of argument, lets say that the total difficulty value for the next few levels is:
· level 3 is 16
· level 4 is 21
· level 5 is 19
· level 6 is 27
· level 7 is 23
· level 8 is 31
· level 9 is 25
תגובות