Level Design Book – Free Chapter Giveaway!
- Posted by: Rudolf
- July 28, 2010
As some of you may know I don’t just make games, I also write about making them. (And do loads of other stuff that is not relevant to this blog post) Somehow between all the other projects I have been working on over the years, I managed to write a book about level design (the pane to the right shows an Amazon link to it) but unfortunately I must admit I have done a poor job letting people know about its existence. This is a shame I think as the book can be very useful to people with diverse interests in the subject. It covers various aspects of level design useful to professionals, academics, students, and people who are interested in game and level design in general. The book is written in such a way that no specific technical knowledge is required and deals with a wide spectrum of subjects in an accessible manner.
In summary I tried to write a fundamental book about level design that is useful to a wide audience, which is a book that I could have used when I started out making games professionally but wasn’t available at the time. The book explores its subject matter by looking at underlying concepts first, then view them through level design theory, and finally put them into context by providing useful practice examples. Hence the title “Level Design Concept, Theory and Practice”.
I think I have done a reasonable job at least in achieving some personal goals, but ultimately its usefulness is something I would rather leave judged by others. Luckily, I have had some really nice reactions to the book, like the following:
“Finally! A book on level design comprehensive and relevant enough that I can recommend it to professional colleagues and students alike. The industry has needed a book like this for years. Kremers leaves no stone unturned, touching upon the relationship between level design and the game’s lighting, audio, story, artificial intelligence, mechanics, puzzles … It’s a truly grand task to take in the domain of ‘level design’ and try to wrap it up into a book of manageable length. Kremers has succeeded in doing so, unafraid to mix in the relevant considerations of game design, art, and psychology where applicable.”
—Chris DeLeon, Independent Videogame Developer, Instructor, and Researcher; Systems and Level Designer for Boom Blox on Wii
February 2010
And this from a review from Choice Magazine:
“This is not just another book that deals with the discipline of level design. … This book covers relevant concepts and theories behind designing levels. Instruction in building levels is replaced by fascinating examinations behind the reasons why.”
June 2010
Hopefully other people may find the book useful as well, so I decided to try to promote the book a bit more than I have been able to do so far. The recent coverage by Gamasutra was very nice, but an excerpt can only give you so much. I therefore asked my publisher if we could give away a full chapter, with several sub chapters included, and they gladly sent me one. The chapter they have chosen explores “reward systems” and is a fairly important one as this is such an important aspect of creating levels.
I am quite chuffed about this as it is a meaty chapter (42 pages) and gives a good idea about the type of content the book offers. Hopefully word will spread and more people will get introduced to the book this way.
So, without further delay, you can download the free pdf here: Chapter 7: Reward Systems.
Rudolf
Hi Rudolf,
Particularly enjoyed the segment on empowerment, it was a clever comparison between unfairness and disempowerment.
With simulation you wrote: “The games would quickly become extremely tedious if they tried to accurately simulate all aspects of the activity in question.” – case in point GTA San Andreas, where they took it too far. They over simulated making players engage in mundane activities like go to the gym which are hard enough to do in the real world, let alone in an escapist setting!
Really liked the following statement as it summed up a lot of what you were saying very neatly: “wish fulfillment means adding gameplay scenarios that create a desire and eventually give the player the means to satisfy it.”
This statement is very true in my own experience from when I started out: “It is frustrating if it is too hard to get a gameplay award. And there is a point where any reward is too little for the enormous effort needed to obtain it. It is worth noting that many level designers, especially those just beginning, err badly in this department.”
Where you talked about social bottlenecks and the reward of breaking away from the group and forging out on your own I instinctively thought of hub areas in MMORPGS like Guild Wars. Tooling up forming a group and leaving the masses to become heroes outside the security of the city.
Really, really enjoyed the read, it gave me a lot of food for thought, even some game ideas! I’m gonna go buy the book right now
Thanks.
Hey, thanks for the feedback and very glad you like the book! (Sorry about the delayed appearance in the comments).
The San Andreas example is a good one and one I use as well. It is odd how the series has moved away from its strengths and added all this extra “work” which to me seems to just add grind to what was a much more freeform experience before. Utlimately I think that we should try to make most of the core player activities interesting, or at least part of an overall interesting mechanic. This seems obvious but unfortunately a lot of design ends up just placing arbitrary, time consuming, obstacles in front of the player and confuses this with worhwhile content.
You can’t please everybody of course, but there is real danger in reward systems that promise a lot (by placing an enormous amount of frustrating or tedious “challenge” between player and reward. It trivialises the player’s time investment and makes the game into a bit of a rat’s maze rather than a fundamentally rewarding experience. I have made that mistake as well in the past, and I see it happen a lot in corporate game development, where it is arbitrarily dictated (generally too late in the dev cycle) that level x needs to be 2 hours long rather than 1, and therefore an additional 7 collectable hats need to be placed in the level and the player needs to level up a bit more before the ring of awesomium can be used.
I once worked on a game where for similar reasons a challenge was added to a level that consisted of carrying a huge rock all the way through a level, in an incredibly tedious manner. There was no payoff really, just the artificially lengthening of the experience via production mandate.
We should fight this school of design whenever we can.
R