managed this feat after the investment of a large amount of development time, though
the payoff seems to have been worth it.
Level Order................................
The order in which the levels occur is also important to the overall flow of the game.
Perhaps big shoot-out levels should be alternated with more strategic or puzzle-ori-
ented levels. If a game places all of its strategic levels early in the game and then
crowds the end with more action-oriented episodes, the game will seem to change mid-
way through, upsetting the balance players have come to expect. At the very least, the
designer should know how the order of the levels will affect the flow of gameplay, and
should be aware of how moving different levels around will affect it. For example, if a
game has thirty levels and six boss monsters, one logical way to place these adversaries
in the game would be at the end of the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, and
thirtieth levels. The bosses certainly do not have to be on those precise levels, and each
can be shifted slightly forward or backward in the level order without causing any seri-
ous problems. If the bosses were placed one each on the last six levels of the game, this
would be obviously unbalanced. It would seem strange to players that after twenty-four
levels of no-boss-monster gameplay, suddenly they have to fight one every level.
The way the game is broken up into its different levels and the order in which those
levels must occur differs from game to game. For a game likeUnreal, as with theDoom
andQuakeseries before it, the designers were only instructed to make some cool lev-
els, with little concern for story (since none of these games really had one) or which
events should happen before which other events. Some thought was put into at what
point certain adversaries would first appear in the game, and hence the earlier levels
were more restricted in which creatures they could use. Similarly, of course, the earlier
levels had to be easier and the later ones had to be harder. But for the most part, the
level designers just tried to make the coolest levels possible, almost working in a vac-
uum from the other designers. Certainly they would see each other’s work and this
might inspire them to make their own levels better, but none of the levels really had to
match up thematically with the levels that came before or after it, and the lack of a story
meant that this did not adversely affect the game.
In games such asIndiana Jones and the Infernal Machine,Knights of the Old Repub-
lic,orThe Suffering, however, the story plays a much larger role. In order for the story
to work, the levels need to support it. Hence, for a more story-centric game, a great
deal of preplanning is done by the game’s design and story teams as to which story
events need to happen in which levels. In what sorts of environments should those lev-
els take place? What types of adversaries will players fight there? The order in which
the levels appear in the game cannot be changed as easily as inDoom, since that would
radically change the story as well. In order for the entire game to flow and escalate in
difficulty appropriately, the type of gameplay found in each level must be planned ahead
of time. The levels do not need to be planned down to minute detail, however, as this is
best left to the level designer, who can place the individual encounters, objects, or
minor puzzles as they best fit the level. A mini design document explaining what the
level has to accomplish in order to function within the game’s story will allow the level
designer to know exactly what she must include in the level; from there she can fill in
the details.
Chapter 23: Level Design 453