I want you to tell me the most memorable video game level you can think of.
Is it All ghillied up from modern warfare?
The suicide mission from mass effect 2?
Or maybe the companion cube level in Portal?
For me, it's the world of tomorrow or sapienza from hitman 2016.
Now I can't speak for you guys, but every inch of these levels is burned into my brain,
and it's not necessarily because they're good.
I can remember every agonising samey tunnel in ocarina of times water temple, and I hate
that place.
These levels... they're just memorable, what's up with that?
A segment or level that sticks in a player's mind is a very useful thing for a game to
have, it's a focusing point that, ideally, condenses the entire experience of playing
a game into a single moment that highlights all the best bits.
It's also an important ingredient for developing a player's mastery, if a player can intimately
understand a given area, it's layout and how it all works, they can begin to pick it
apart from a more abstract perspective and finally begin to consider their role in the
level and why things were designed the way they were.
There's also the not-insignificant benefit of memorable levels being great marketing
tools, I know of at least 4 people who got sold on titanfall 2 because of the time travel
level and one of them is me.
Let's actually take a look at Effect and Cause in more detail, because it's a great
example of what I think is the key to a memorable level, that being a sense of singular theme.
Effect and cause starts off with you and your robobuddy investigating a ruined facility
that turns out to have messed around with time a bit, causing you to be catapulted between
past and the present as you try to navigate it.
The bit that makes effect and cause stand out though is how the simple addition of the
time travel gimmick is used to change the same mechanics you've been using for a few
hours now into something new and exciting.
The time travel mechanic is what I've elected to call a locus, no not the big, angry grasshoppers,
but a mathematical term meaning the place where multiple lines and curves intersect.
You've always been shooting people, but now you can hop into the other timeline to
reposition yourself, or sometimes fight two separate battles at once.
You've always used the fantastic platforming mechanics, but now you'll also have to jump
between time in order to make it through safely.
By unifying the mechanics around a common idea, they take on a new light and become
part of an experience with something concrete to say, and importantly, with a tangible theme
for your brain to grapple with.
It's this strong simple understanding that makes it memorable.
Memorable themes and loci aren't always abstract high concept ideas, they can also
be physical places within a game.
All the zelda dungeons are built around a single structure that centres your understanding
of the level In skyward sword's ancient cistern it's this big moving statue, in
twilight princess' arbiter's grounds it's this big central room, and in a link to the
past's hyrule castle revisited, it's this huge corridor filled with baddies you've
got to fight through to reach zelda.
Without these central structures to focus your mental map of the dungeon, you'd quickly
get disoriented, ruining that feeling of physical mastery the dungeons are built around.
Memorable ideas and themes are great ways of hammering home important plot bits, gameplay
lessons or for marketing your game, but they're surprisingly handy for developing games too.
Look at Rayman Legends, a very good game, with an interesting philosophy to level design.
When you play through Frog Story, Teensies in trouble or Living dead party, you'll
notice that they all have a very strong thematic locus in the form of the level's setting,
and it's this locus that gets used as an inspiration.
Living dead party has lava-blocking guac, worms that eat through cake, size-changing
trumpets and luchadore wrestlers - all things that evoke an image of dia le los meurtos,
the mexican festival of the dead.
Now these mechanics all work fine in isolation, and could easily be reskinned to fit in a
far more generic setting, but the fact that they all spring from the same source ties
the level together in a satisfying way that no game can really match and makes the penultimate
stage where they all get brought together and musical bonus level a real treat as the
entire spectrum of mechanics gets put on display at once.
The aim of rayman legends was to be able to "play inside the concept art", and to
do this, ubisoft actually developed a whole new level editor that let them create weird
shaped terrain and not be held back by mario and sonic's tile-based design- it's fascinating
stuff and there's a link to a talk about it in the description.
In the world 20,000 lums under the sea, this gorgeous concept art gets brought to life
in the form of this brilliant Jules verne/James bond hybrid.
A fusion of underwater whimsy and spy adventure led to the creation of these sentry enemies,
which serve as a mechanical representation of the world's locus, actingas a reference
point for how you're interacting with the level, from stealthy sneaking around to breakneck
dodging in the awesome elevator fight level, also something that never would've happened
without strong thematic inspiration.
You might think that limiting yourself only to things that'd fit within your concept
art or a limited theme like "time travel" might make level design harder, in fact, if
anything, it leads to better levels in the long run.
Chris McEntee, a level designer at Ubisoft who worked on Rayman Legends says it best
"Constraints don't hold you back from making the perfect idea come to life; instead
they force the perfect idea out of you.
Without enough constraints you can easily lose direction."
This is unfortunately shown quite often in another platformer, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Whilst the levels all have a unique theme, very rarely does that theme ever feel like
it's anything more than window dressing.
In the stage Dragon Road from sonic unleashed, there's bits where you glide across water
and these spinny platforms, but the stage itself has a distinctly chinese aesthetic,
whilst the level segments are fun as individual units, they don't really fit together very
well.
Same with say, speed highway, filmed in sonic generations because fuck no am I playing sonic
adventure again I don't hate myself that much.
The loop the loops and running down this building are fun, but you could reskin this into green
hill zone and I'd be none the wiser.
It's not that these stages aren't good, but they lack a sense of being, I don't
know, *about* something, having an idea they want the player to understand and learn from
beyond the immediacy of gameplay.
Maybe sonic could learn a thing or two from another blue platforming icon, megaman.
In an interview with Kitamura san, one of the guys behind the original megaman games,
he had this to say about the development process "It wasn't made according to one mastermind's
whims and fancies; it was a melting pot of ideas from different people".
In any megaman game, the gameplay elements are usually consistent, jumping, shooting,
and occasionally riding on cars.
It's actually the robot masters, the bosses of each level, that are usually the first
new additions to each game.
Although Kitamura left capcom before megaman would really come into its own, his philosophy
endures here.
See, the robot masters are often sourced from outside of capcom in stuff like public design
competitions and such can add some really interesting limitations to the design team.
By combining the limits of megaman's simple toolset with the theming of the individual
robot masters, capcom get to create unique and interesting levels that somehow all feel
memorable and like they capture a very specific theme, despite the fact that you're mostly
doing the same sort of thing every time.
This is stuff like bounce man's weird carnival themed stage with this utterly terrifying
frog, Block Man's cool industrial themed stage and Torch Man's level styled after
camping in the woods- by going after specific, memorable aesthetics, the megaman team can
still create interesting, fresh-feeling levels even though they've now got like 6 fire
dudes in their roster.
Memorable levels with a strong core theme elevate themselves beyond the sum of their
parts, and that big idea can carry the entire gameplay experience if used correctly.
As much as the idea of themed worlds gets parodied and mocked, it's a genius little
invention.
The aesthetic of an environment can be used to create a variety of interesting challenges-
underwater levels offer a new range of movement and ice levels offer a twist on platforming
physics.
The trick is to make the experience cohesive, too often ice physics is slapped onto a level
where it doesn't work, but used correctly, it can add some much needed texture and memorability
to an otherwise bland level.
No better is this exemplified than in HITMAN.
Holy shit, I could draw every one of its now 14 levels out from memory - and so can basically
any other player.
For those who don't know, each level in hitman is an intricate puzzle box of interlocking
parts that you've got to use to your advantage in order to kill one of many cartoonishly
evil bad guys.
Each level is based around a single high concept story idea- A fashion show that hides a black
market auction, a sleepy italian town with a superweapon lab hidden nearby, a futuristic
race, you get the picture.
These story themes are used to inform and deepen your understanding of the level.
In the world of tomorrow, for example, each route will usually start in the picturesque
town of sapienza, where a detective is looking for one of your targets, a psychologist is
preparing to meet with another and a cook is late for work.
These story routes will invariably lead you out of the town and towards the mansion, though
this gap in the wall, this cliffside path, or even through the sewers.
There you'll assassinate your targets before moving into the caves below to shut down the
research lab.
By having implicit and explicit stories that follow this pattern, each approaching the
mansion from different directions, HITMAN helps you to build up a complete picture of
the level's layout and schedules by basing your knowledge on your own subjective experiences.
When you find this cannon in the abandoned tower, you can see it looks out onto a golf
course.
Using your memory of that time you impersonated Silvio's golf coach to seduce and kill Francesca,
you can work out that he'll be in exactly the right spot to get blown up when he takes
his lessons.
Or, because you saw it when you impersonated the detective, you'll know there's a weak
wall *here* that can be blown up for an easy escape route out of the secret lab.
The level theme and story forms a locus that centres your understanding and allows you
to build up a mental map of the level informed by your personal experiences, creating not
only a sense of mastery, but an emotional connection with the level itself.
That's what memorable levels are all about really, creating a singular, personal link
to the game that transcends what you immediately feel when playing it.
An understanding of the importance of strong themes is why I've got a lot of time for
tiny concept games like The haunted Island: a frog detective game.
The game is about 45 mins long, and has no replayability, but damn if it doesn't know
exactly what it wants to be, and that is an adorably wholesome game about an adorably
wholesome frog detective.
The entire game has a needlepoint focus on creating a very whimsical, funny aesthetic
that I've not seen anywhere else, even if the basic dialogue puzzles it employs to evoke
it are pretty run of the mill.
Sometimes all it takes is a single memorable level to shake things up, or tie things together.
Chapter 10 of Fire Emblem awakening is an emotional gut punch and seriously tricky level
against one of the best written throwaway bosses in series history, and Halo 3's Warthog
run is a bombastic, action packed capstone to a landmark FPS trilogy that very quickly
went to shit.
These are experiences that have transcended the already great games they were a part of
to permanently lodge themselves in the collective gaming consciousness, and it's all because
of a strong sense of theme.
There's a lot of talk in game design circles about great mechanics, or great enemy design,
but I feel like there's not enough discussion about games as complete wholes, as collections
of mechanics, story, graphics and challenges, all working together to give the player a
singular, memorable bit of gameplay that means something personal to them - and that's
what I'm trying to uncover.
So the next time you're playing a game, try to think about not an individual mechanic
or bit of music, but how the entire level works together to communicate an idea, and
what that idea is.
Because I think in finding that Locus, you'll be better able to preserve the time you've
had with the game for years to come, and make it into a memorable experience that'll stick
around long after you've stopped playing.
Hi, thanks for watching!
Before I give you the usual spiel about how this show is brought to you by the generous
support of my patrons, here's something else you should be aware of.
The excellent artist and youtuber Blackthornprod did some awesome fanart of me and some less
important people.
This is completely awesome and I love it to bits, it basically just shows up how bad of
an artist I actually am, do send him some love please.
If you want some other people to send some love to, how about my top-tier supporters,
who are:
Samuel VanDer Plaats Lucas Slack
William Johansen ReysDad
Jonathan Kristensen Joshua Binswanger
Derk-Jan Karrenbeld Patrick Rhomberg
Alex Deloach Baxter Heal
Strategia in Ultima LunarEagle1996
Daniel Mettjes Aseran
Brian Notarianni Chao
Thank you all for watching, thank you all for your patience, and stay tuned for the
end of year wrapup video which should be with you soon.
Bye!
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