Game Design Patterns For Designing Stealth Comp...

In its place we are reintroducing the Level Design Document This is a documentfrom years past, which was dropped to make room for the Visual Design Document. This document will help programmers, designers, and UI designers to hone what a level means, what patterns mean, and how to combine them for increased complexity.

This assignment will capture key learning objectives while minimizing work. For the purposes of this truncated semester, this document distills elements of tutorial design, level design, and storyboarding. In designing this document, you should first review the online lecture on Level Design.

All teams have plenty of experience with design philosophies by now. This statement should focus on level design instead of just game mechanics. Keep it short at 2-3 paragraphs. The purpose of this initial section is to give us criteria that we can use to judge the rest of the document.

In this section of the document you should list several basic patterns for the game (at least three). For each pattern, provide a single storyboard illustrating the challenge and an an accompanying paragraph describing the pattern. Again,explain how the pattern constrains the player, not what the player will do.

We have some examples of basic patterns in the examples below.Think about level design in games that you have played and take inspiration from that, rather than looking at a document for a game you have never seen before. Many of your favorite genres have well-established patterns. Here are a few examples, to help your team think of design possibilities.

Cover: In a stealth game, guards typically cannot see you while you are behind walls, crates or other obstructions. You therefore need to move quickly from coverto cover, so that you are never seen by the guards.

Cover: As the name implies, cover shooters also use cover as a design pattern. While enemies can see you behind cover, they cannot hit you with weapons. Of course, you cannot hit them while in cover either. The challenge in these game is to come out of cover at just the right time to hit another enemy.

This might seem a little abstract, and it is hard to fully describe without seeing it in a document with the appropriate basic patterns. See the first few examples below, most notably Aphelion and Squeak & Swipe. However, what we want is very straightforward if you think about how this works in other games.

Now that you have the basic patterns, create some levels. We want three levels: aneasy level, an intermediate level, and a hard level. You do not have to have all ofyour design patterns in each level. The design patterns also do not have to be tuned toexactly the same difficulty in each level. For example, in a platformer, the hard level is often the result of taking a standard high precision jump and making it more precise.

In creating each level, the team should should storyboard it clearly. In addition,annotate which design patterns are in the level and where they are located.As an example of what we are looking for, consider this annotated level from the 2014 game Dash.

Another popular game from the Spring 2016 Showcase, Aphelion was a puzzle game that consisted of a large number of challenging levels. This document is longer than some of the others, so be sure to look at others besides this one for guidance. Despite its length, it still maintains clarity without overload. In particular, they do anexcellent job of identifying complex patterns and incorporating them into their game.

Since 2017 was a one of the great years for mobile games, it was easy to overlook the minimalist game Canon. However, they did really well at Showcase and were acceptedto Boston Festival of Indie Games because of strong level design. This document showsexactly how to come up with patterns and assemble them together to make a level.

The viral Reddit sensation Underhand is another 2017 game. We put its documenta little later than the others because it is a very non-standard level design document.As this game is a strategy card game, it does not have the traditional notion of levels.However, they can adjust the difficulty and were able to identify the proper ways to do that.

In the alien dimension, things take a turn for the worseat least, interms of gameplay. Although it's not a game breaker by any means, the storyline experiences a significant lull here. Initially, Gordon is required to jumpfrom platform to platform in a sub-Mario platform game style. This abrupt changein the gameplay is a showstopper as far as the suspension of disbelief, whichthe designers had worked so hard to cultivate, is concerned. And as if thatdidn't deal enough of a blow, the subsequent levels are practicallystraight out of the original Quake, culminating in a showdown with thebig, bad, end-of-game boss. Now, we don't mean to be unduly harsh on anotherwise excellent game, but the last third of the game is a real letdown ingameplay terms. All of the innovative and exciting features of the Black Mesalevels were replaced with a standard first-person jump'n'shooter. Evenwith the benefit of the intriguing and imaginative end sequence, the damage isdone by this point: The suspension of disbelief is shattered and the player isleft feeling somehow cheated. The inclusion of the platform-based level followedby the standard first-person fare is a classic nonsequitur that affects theenjoyment of the game.

An explicit challenge is an intentional challenge specifically designed by the game designer. An example is the exact timing required to dodge the swinging pendulums in Quake III Arena (see Figure 7.4). This kind of challenge tends to be more immediate and intense than an implicit challenge.

An implicit challenge is one that is not specifically designed in; inother words, it is an emergent feature of the game design. An example of animplicit challenge is figuring out the most efficient way to distribute itemsamong your group in a traditional computer role-playing game (CRPG) such asBlack Isle's Baldur's Gate. Implicit challenges tend to be moredrawn out and less focused than explicit challenges.

Games of imperfect knowledge are much more common than games of perfectknowledge. This is because one of the key elements of gameplay is challengingthe player to hypothesize about the game worlds, forming her own internalpicture. The degree to which this picture matches the real thing depends verymuch on the logic and inference skills of the player. It is much harder todesign a good game without the element of mystery. Only a few designers canachieve this with any degree of success. Mystery can be viewed as the easy wayout. There is no better way to hook a player than to get her involved in acompelling mystery story. Human curiosity is a very strong attractor, and anygame that successfully taps into this provides a strong gameplay element.Half-Life did this extremely well, putting the player in the role of anew scientist trying to escape after a hideous cross-dimensional experimentalerror at his first day of work.

One problem with games of perfect information is that, because of the difficulty of designing an engaging playing experience without hiding anything from the player, they tend to be very simple. Usually, they are implemented as computer board games or simple arcade games. Archon (see Figure 7.8) is an excellent example of a computerized board game that was popular in the 1980s.

You can see this effect for yourself: Stare up at the clouds and see whatthey resemble (as an imaginative game designer, you should have no problem withthis). For a slightly less subjective test, stare at the static on a televisionset for a minute or two, and you should begin to see imaginary structurespinwheeling about the screen. This is the brain attempting to find patternswhere there are none.

In some fairly unique games, the brain's ability to recognize patternscan be tuned into, to enhance the ability of the player. An example of this isTetris. Tetris can be played consciously, examining each block asit falls and actively deciding where to stack the block for best effect.However, the best players don't seem to play like this, especially at thelater levels, where blocks fall too fast to be able to make any consciousdecision where to put them. Instead, these players seem to tune into the game atan almost subconscious level and enter what we call the \"Tetristrance,\" a Zen-like state in which the players seem to lose all trackof time and don't concentrate on the specifics of the game board. Insteadthe players defocus and appear to process the entire playing area as a whole,without considering the individual elements. In fact, if these players were inthe Star Wars universe, the Force would be strong in them.

So, if the brain's primary cognitive function is to recognize patterns,what does this mean in terms of gameplay Pattern-recognition challenges canmake or break a game, depending on how they are used. If in an entirelydeterministic game one or more of the players can determine the pattern of play,this allows them to make 100% accurate predictions about game world eventsbefore they actually occur. Although they should be commended on their acumen,this does not make the game fun for the other players. This could rapidlydegenerate to the situation in which it is almost as if the predicting player isa god of the game world and the other players are mere pawns, with no free willof their own.

Note that the opposing players can be either humans with limited play optionsor a computer opponent that has been programmed to respond in certain ways tospecific inputs. We heard a story once about a game with an adaptive computeropponent; the opponent's skill level depended on the perceived level ofskill of the player. Soon players discovered that the easiest way to progresspast difficult levels in the game was to deliberately do badly in the levelsimmediately preceding the difficult level, whereupon the computer immediatelyeased up on the player, making the difficult level slightly easier. Althoughthis is an ingenious and valid approach, it is probably not what the designerintended, even from emergent behavior. No battle in the field has ever been wonby the enemy commander sympathizing with his opponents' lack of ability and\"going easy on them.\" Note that in the context of gameplay, adaptivedifficulty is a useful tool. Just don't make it so recognizable to theplayer that she can exploit it to progress in the game. This is one pattern thatyou do not want the player to recognize. 59ce067264

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