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[diegzumillo]

Cool stuff. I'm very inexperienced in level design so it's a little daunting task for me at the moment.

About planning, there's something that always bothered me in several situations while playing games. When I'm about to enter a dungeon and there's a shopkeeper nearby, do I buy silver bullets, garlic and stakes or both? Is that a vampire or werewolf cave? When choosing the loadout on a stealth game like Deus Ex and Thief, do I take a lot of ammunition or water arrows (to keep the place dark)?

I answer these questions based on information about the upcoming challenges. If I don't now what I'll face it's a simple gamble. Gambling isn't necessarily bad but is its own thing, and in most cases people don't like that, thus some kind of information is important. If you give him the complete level layout he will plan his move and purchase the required items to do that, or change his strategy if that's too expensive. If you give him only partial information then it adds a risk factor. How much is a matter of choice by the designer, as it results in different experiences.

Deus Ex gives you partial information. When I play Deus Ex I know for a fact that if I prepare myself for stealth I'll be able to stealth, and if I prepare myself for war I'll be able to fight my way through. This information comes from the game's identity, it defines itself very soon during the first level. Thief, which is one of my favorite games of all time, would start every level with a gamble. There's no fixed identity like DX and the only information was a loose description of the mission, you rarely knew what the level would be like and what you would need, so the experience would vary in ways the level designer may not see, messing with the challenge balance completely. If gambling has its appeal in some cases, this is not one of them. Thief 2 had much more thorough introduction, filled with useful information.

[Alec S.]

A lot of games get around this by either letting you get away with being unprepared for a short amount of time, or have a relatively low punishment for failure.  In both cases, it let's you see what you need to prepare for, and lets you go back and do so before you get too deep in and have to redo a bunch of stuff.  Like, in Pokemon Red/Blue, the first gym leader is basically designed to beat you if you try to fight him right away, which many players are likely to do their first time playing.  You don't lose that much for losing, and it gets it in your head that you need to train before fighting gym leaders (then it provides a convenient square of tall grass just outside the town for you to train in).  

The trainers leading up the the gym leaders also serve as a way the player can gauge whether they've prepared enough for the gym leader.  Since the gym trainers are slightly easier than the leader, it means that if the player just barely eke out a victory against the trainer, they probably should go level up their pokemon some more.

And, of course, if you walk into a dungeon and are immediately attacked by monsters that can poison you, you're likely to then walk out and stock up on antidote (and in this situation, a reasonable strategy for the player is to always have a small supply of each status healing item, so that if they receive a status ailment, they can deal with it and then go back to get a bunch of that specific item).  If, however, you make it half-way through the dungeon before the poison monsters show up, then you'll probably feel cheated and frustrated.  

So basically you can give the player enough advance information that they can figure out how they need to prepare (you could also make that foreknowledge itself a reward for some other challenge.  Like, if there's an NPC that the player can find by exploring that gives you information on the next level), you can let them fail early and fail fast and give them a second chance, you can let them dip their toes in the water and backtrack if they need anything, or you can set up a consistent game-logic where the player always knows that they need to prepare for certain situations.  I'm sure there are some other options as well.

A lot of this actually falls into a topic that I want to cover at some point, but haven't quite figured out exactly how to approach it, which is "influencing player behavior through level design", so I might be talking about some of this in an article some time.

[juan]

Awesome tutorials man! It was cool that you used the Mega Man X sequelitis video, that
was one of the things that first got me thinking about game design and how the levels are
set out.

[Alec S.]

Thanks!  Yeah, that video actually helped inform a lot of my thoughts about level design.

Anyway, Part 8:  Gating and Implicit Linearity

[Alec S.]

Part 9: Navigation Through Non-Linear Levels

[Mr Speaker]

This is a fantastic series... really loving it!

[Alec S.]

Part 10: The Revenge of Planning Out Levels

[mirrorfish]

Just a +1 for this series being awesome! Great food for thought! 

Thanks!
M.

[Alec S.]

Thanks!   

Part 11: Designing Around Failure

[Gueib]

This is really cool. Being a one-man team and a lousy level designer I find this incredibly useful.

[doublehappy]

...it can't be over!   
Seriously though. Epic job. Thank you for sharing!

[Alec S.]

There are more coming!  Just hadn't figured out which topic I wanted to put next, so I didn't put a "in the next part" sentence.

[Tuba]

Nice series

[andhedrew]

Thank you got this, it's really good stuff! A great advancement on how I think of level design. 

[indie11]

awesome series! I am in process of making a platformer game and this series surely will help me out in laying out levels.

A request, can you write a blog post on randomly generated levels? basic layout and different obstacles in it. Thanks

[Alec S.]

Thanks, guys!

As far as randomly generated levels go, that's an area I'm not really familiar with, so I wouldn't be the right person to talk about it. 

[One-bit Punch]

Fantastic articles! Thank you SO much for sharing, much appreciated. Here's another +1 for you good sir

[oodavid]

If you're stuck for the next instalment, may I make a completely selfish request?:

How to balance linear puzzle games akin to candy-crush - not the match-3 element, but rather the gradual introduction of puzzle elements, plateauing, revisiting old puzzle elements etc. This is something I'm really struggling with - tis very easy to make it too hard too quick, or boring by virtue of being too easy...

[Alec S.]

Puzzle games aren't really my area of expertise, but a lot of what I covered in Part 5 (and to a lesser extent 6) should also apply to puzzle games.  Introduce a concept, play with it in a few interesting ways, introduce something else, play with it, combine it with the first thing in interesting ways, introduce another element, mix it in with the previous elements, ect...  Remember that you can challenge and interest the player not just with something harder, but also just with something different, that requires the player to think about the content differently.  Because of this, you can avoid the problem of ramping up the difficulty too quickly, or keeping things too stagnant, by keeping things varied in terms of your content, and what you do with that content.  If you're still having problems, it might mean that you need more content elements before designing levels.

Also, sorry for the delay, there should be a new post this coming week.

[Alec S.]

Part 12:  Hubs and Shortcuts