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In 2010 I started at Crystal Dynamics to work on the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot. Within my first two weeks, I was entered into a “Thunderdome” exercise in which I had two days to revamp a traversal level, competing against a senior level designer who had worked on Assassin’s Creed 2. A winner would be chosen after the time expired and that level used in the game.Prior, I had never designed a level for a game using more than a simple jump mechanic where the player could only land on their feet. You can probably guess that I lost, but what started was my education into the intricacies of laying -
Hallways are a necessary evil in video games and more specifically level design. Not only are they a natural part of architecture but hallways may be necessary for technical, pacing and narrative reasons. Hallways are a great place for streaming to occur and they are a natural place to slow down the pacing of the level and let the player take a breather. However lame hallways might sound to gamers, if done correctly, they can go from being a bland part of your level to one of the highlights. All level designers have been faced with the problem of dealing with a boring hallway se -
In the third installment of his Action Adventure Level Design series, Lara Croft creator Toby Gard examines how the design process should incorporate discussions of pacing, structure, and mood -- and how leads can hone their feedback to the team to make it all work. Part 1 described how to create a Level Flow Plan to hand off to the level team. Part 2 described a variety of tools to help turn those Level Flows into detailed, immersive and interesting levels plans. By the end of the process described in the last article -- building through fiction -- you will most likely have a mixture of pa -
This is the second part of a three part series of articles dealing with level design in action adventure games. Part 1 described Level Flow Diagrams, that act as the core of the level brief provided to a team by the Leads. Part 2 describes a process of expanding that brief into a detailed level plan. This stage of the process is most often carried out by a cross-discipline team of designers, artists and coders, who will expand the level brief into a detailed level plan, but this process can equally be the next step that an individual designer takes when designing a level solo. A Note on Co -
In this article, Toby Gard introduces the fundamentals behind the design of story-driven levels. While consideration of the gameplay is axiomatic to any successful level design, the inclusion of story elements - characters, objects, pacing, emotional tone, and narrative theme, to name a few - adds a whole new dimension to the process, specifically in the form of cross-team collaboration. Artists, composers, writers, coders, designers all have a hand in the design process, a little bit like the making of a film. Of course, anyone who has worked collaboratively knows that this type of situat
