which places further importance on the end of a level as the completion of a unit of
gameplay. A level can function like an act in a play, a chapter in a book, or a movement in
a symphony. It gives the audience a chance to see a discrete unit within a larger work, to
understand what portion of the work has been completed and how much awaits ahead.
Carefully orchestrated levels are set up such that they have a series of tension and
release moments to create an emotional curve for the player to experience. When play-
ers finally see that the level has ended, they know that they have accomplished a
significant amount of gameplay and should feel proud of themselves.
Technical limitations often dictate where the end of a level must occur. Only so
many textures, sounds, and level data can fit in memory at once, and when those
resources are used up, the gameplay has to stop long enough for different world data to
be loaded in. New technologies present the opportunity for more seamless environ-
ments. Even on the technically limited PlayStation, the developer Insomniac was able
to avoid loading screens entirely inSpyro the Dragon, instead just having Spyro fly into
the air for a second (while the necessary data is swapped in) and then having him fly
back to earth in the new level. To casual players watchingSpyro, the break is much less
jarring than seeing a “loading” screen come up. TheSpyro the Dragonlevels still have to
be divided into sections between these non-loading screens, however, meaning that the
gameplay in those levels is still limited to a certain amount of space. A good designer, of
course, can take the memory constraints and use them properly to create levels that
are fun and challenging to play while also fitting in the space available. Again, the
designer must take the limitations of the hardware and embrace them.
Half-Lifeis another interesting example of level division. Here the team at Valve
wanted to create a more seamless experience for players, but were still using the lim-
itedQuaketechnology.Quakehad featured thirty or so levels, each of which took a
significant amount of time to load. InQuakethe levels existed in separate universes
from each other; never would a monster chase players from one level to another, never
would players return to a previous level. The programmers at Valve came up with a sys-
tem where, if the levels were small enough, they could be loaded in less than five
seconds. They also made modifications so that monsters could track players across the
boundaries between maps. The level designers at Valve were able to make their levels
very small, much smaller than a standardQuakelevel, but then created a great quantity
of them. The areas between two levels contain identical architecture, such that players
can run across the border between two of these levels and, aside from the brief loading
message, not even know they had crossed a level boundary. The result is a much more
seamless experience for players. Evidently the team still felt the need for story arcs in
the game, since text “chapter titles” appear briefly on the screen at key points during
the game. Indeed, these titles work quite nicely as mini-rewards for the players, letting
them know they have accomplished a good chunk of gameplay, much like used to be
conveyed by a long level load. But since the programming and design teams were able
to create a near-seamless level loading system, the design team was able to separate
the game into these storytelling units wherever it felt best, instead of where the tech-
nology dictated. The ideal for an immersive game likeHalf-Life, of course, would be to
eliminate these load times entirely.
SinceHalf-Lifewas released, some games have managed to pull off a com-
pletely continuous world, includingJak & DaxterandDungeon Siege. These games only
452 Chapter 23: Level Design