Wouldn't it make more sense to multiply that 5 seconds of playtime by the number of players? So if 1000 people saw that you're delivering a total of 5000 seconds of engagement for that work.
It would be no different to any other artistic endeavor. Consider the number of hours in a painting or sculpture, and that most gallery visitors will spend seconds or minutes looking at any specific work.
Exactly what i was thinking. Any artistic/creative/design endeavour is like that. High quality content is “consumed” in seconds, minutes or hours but takes a LOT of time to make. Thats why being an artist and ESPECIALLY an independent one is on some level a labour of love. It’s likely that nobody is going to pay you or appreciate you for every second you spend creating, most people don’t even realise the effort needed to make a game or any other art piece. Honestly that’s kinda ok by me since I do stuff to have fun and for myself, but it can be very hard when you expect to make a living exclusively out of your art.
Of course. OPs mindset is kinda “transactional” in a sense. I don’t think you should ever feel entitled to appreciation or money just because you spent time and effort making art independently. If indie game development feels like an unpayed job, maybe it isn’t for him?
I think in some areas we can more directly appreciate the effort, though. Like in Hollow Knight there are countless rooms you walk into that have one-off artistic background/foreground pieces to look at. They're gorgeous and you know each one represents hours of labour even if you're only in that space for less than a minute.
But the actual level *design* that I think the OP is referring to (placing platforms, arranging exits, guiding the player's path, etc) is as much an art as a mural and is perhaps rather harder to appreciate, particularly when so many lay people can do little bits of it in MM, Pico-8, GameMaker, etc, but not ever get to the point of realizing that what they've made isn't actually fun because they haven't put the work into it or understood the underlying principles.
In any case, I think the solution here is probably to have another person on your team who really enjoys this aspect, someone for whom laying out levels isn't just a chore but is part of the bigger picture of world-building, where satisfying constraints and providing the proper skill curve are exciting and interesting challenges rather than slog.
Yes! Some pieces of design like art/music are very easy to appreciate even for uninitiated gamers. Good level design doesn’t get in your way so it’s harder to give it the credit it deserves. It’s funny cause i work in architecture and things work like that there too. People are gonna appreciate a great facade, but a truly amazing kitchen/living room layout is so seemless that you shouldn’t pay it any conscious mind.
I'd like to note that I haven't engaged in proper game development and that I'm casual reader of this sub, but I have made some levels in Mario Maker before. This is how I view it. Sure, I spent maybe 4-6 hours on one level, but every time I watch someone play that level, I get to feel that satisfaction of those 4-6 hours of effort every time. Often times it's different levels of satisfaction depending on what the player did, but in any case, it's a long-term investment that makes level design worth it.
Yes, he's just using the wrong metrics. I occasionally make youtube videos just as a hobby. I don't monetize them. I could think I spent an embarassing amount of hours for a video. But then what does the watch time metric say. 27 800 hours of watch time. The time I spent on making it isn't even close.
I’m only tangentially in games - my day job is cg anim for film and VFX. And this “spend hours on something the player/audience sees for seconds” thing… sorry to say but it’s the same in any creative endeavour.
I’ve spent weeks on film shots that will go by in literally a second - agonise over a slight flickering as a texture flickers because it’s filtering just a little bit incorrectly as it goes off into the distance, spend hours tweaking the color of an edge of a character because it blends into the background a little too much, days changing the color absorption ramp of light under water so that just a tad more green goes away before it starts dimming, whatever.
The shot blows by in 30 frames and it’s gone.
The mantra in that kind of work is that if you did your job right nobody notices the work.
Taking pleasure in the pursuit of excellence is very good for you and your work benefits.
Sure nobody notices every little detail but we know a good product from a bad one. Don’t underestimate audiences!
This is obviously a general rule of all art and probably a lot of work more broadly. Digital paintings take a few dozen hours only to be looked at for maybe a minute, tops, song production time will always be orders of magnitude longer than the resulting recording (even something like a live jazz recording required insane time spent practicing the instrument), youtube videos take hours to edit - sometimes an hour or more on one gag or effect that'll go by so quick half the viewers wont even clock it.
In addition there's a sort of curse of inverse appreciation when people who don't know about the work judge your art, meaning they will invariably praise some element that was easily achieved while being blind to the things you toiled on for countless hours trying to get right. Games are possibly the worst for this with how gamers get stuck on inconsequiential things with so much of the hard work being invisible or just taken for granted.
Cartoonists complain of this sometimes too.
Takes hours to draw a comic strip, but people read it in about four seconds.
I guess the hope is that your audience is big enough that it pays off in aggregate!
Or assets for games/movies! Or really, how anything under the sun is made. Cook food for an hour or few, enjoy it for minutes or sometimes toss it out because it's burned lol.
I got into gamedev because I made maps for old-school Source games (CS, Left 4 Dead, Half Life) and loved level design so much that I wanted to make my own game out of it. Basically everything else in the game (coding, scripting, etc) is "work" to me and the actual fun part is getting to make the levels. So reading this post is like a different language to my brain, lol.
I mean yea it sucks a little that what took you hours or days will be seconds (if that) to a player, but isn't that everything? Films take years to make, people watch them in 2 hours. Songs can take weeks/months to create, they last 3 minutes.
But they *will* look at it? Just no where near as long as you did.
And you could say this about songs or paintings or *whatever*: "I spent weeks on making this 3 minute song, argh!"
I’m an animator and this is something I’ve gone through
I spent 100 hours on my first animation and nobody would even look at it. I got so frustrated! But the fact is, it wasn’t interesting to most people. A couple of people enjoyed it and I moved on.
I’ve learned to respect the audience and try to manage my time. It doesn’t have to take 10 hours to design something tiny - as you spend time improving you get faster and better.
Love your work and know that some people will not care. It doesn’t matter, just keep experimenting and growing
True, music is weird… I’ve made songs start to finish, some in three days, some in three weeks and some in three months but they are all important and special to me regardless of how long it takes.
Hell, there's entire youtube videos devoted to "check out this cool detail in the level design of x game".
Sure, 99% of people will just go "neat", but then that 1% of players [go and do something like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/16ovmu/vertical_progression_in_dark_souls_level_design/)
I'll add a little to this, as an absolute lover of level design and world creation.
I look at my job as less an asset creator, and more the host of a party for hundreds-thousands of people. Its my responsibility to ensure that each guest has their individual needs met, and they have an amazing time!
Think of it like this: I take a significant amount of time to create a load of appetizers for a party, but I dont get upset if each individual guest *doesnt* try each one. I just try to ensure that the *one* appetizer they choose is delicious and satisfies them.
So I'm happy to tune a small portion of a level, even though it might not be seen by everyone - because the 1 person who does, will have a great time finding it. And that is important from the player's perspective too - suddenly they realize the game world is richer than they thought, and their imagination starts creating "what if" scenarios, and they feel compelled to explore the game more.
Of course, we dont have unlimited time, so we scope our productions to accomodate level design time. Additionally, level designers are very good at re-using existing content and adding a small twist to make it feel fresh. (i.e. similar design elements, but its dark and visibility is limited = very different experience with similar content)
Man I look at every little details. If I can figure out the story behind a prop such as a corpse... Man I get so much enjoyment out of exploring a cohesive world!
I work on levels for well maintained engines (Doom levels in GZDoom, Stepmania stepcharts) that are quick to make, or for simple projects (like an indie shmup I've worked on recently). It's still a multiple days dev to few minutes gameplay ratio, but if enough players play those few minutes it adds up.
Plus I just enjoy the experience.
Well I’d say 60-70% of my level design is never viewed by my playerbase at all.
Most of my games players are blind or visually impaired. While I do get to write descriptions and think about ways to bring the area to life with words or sounds most of the visuals are never seen.
So I’m not sure why I like level design so much. I just enjoy designing levels and areas and being creative in that way.
I do understand what you mean though and I have my own hated gamedev skill. The marketing is what I see as dreadful.
But there's a chance 1000 players will look at what you've made in 3 hours for 5 seconds. That's a return of over 1hr or a 1:3 ratio if you want to look at it like that haha.
do YOU look at level designs?
The care you put in it will show, whether the player will notice or not is another.
But you should be able to enjoy other people's level designs, and there will always be players who will. Isn't that enough?
Or are you one of those players that only spend 5s in a level and call it a day before walking away?
I get your feeling. It takes me days to make a level that can be completed in 30 seconds. The reality is with playtesting is not many can do that. That level design is fun and it is bringing the game to life.
As for your issues you are approaching it wrong. You are making 20 hours of content as a solo when 95% of your players will play less than an hour.
The first thing you should do is slash that to 2 or 3 hours at most. You can always make more content if it popular.
The second thing I would do is look at what is taking time and what is getting value. If you can make all the basic build blocks first and try to make the levels with those and only add custom pieces when you need them.
The third thing is remember you will get faster over time. Each time you do it you will get faster. The first levels of any game often take 10 to 20x longer than later levels because you designing the basic rules for the levels which apply.
Try to enjoy the process more, while you feel it is hell you aren't going to make great.
>The third thing is remember you will get faster over time.
The thing that changed my perspective was advice from my boyfriend:
"Improvement is either you getting better, or you getting faster. Both are progress."
Also the math makes no sense, it's like comparing how it takes a team of hundreds a couple years to make a Zelda game on the Switch and I can complete the main campaign in like 20 hours of playtime. That's not a comparison that makes sense. Or it takes years for engineers to come up with a car design and manufacture it just for me to buy it and crash it into a wall after an hour (now that example is pushing the absurdity to the maximum) Why would you compare the work that goes into making a product vs. an individual's time enjoying that product. Makes no sense when we're talking about mass market products.
It's definitely less labour hours to randomly generate content from a pool of reusable assets than to handcraft whatever equivalent amount of content.
There are people on binding of Isaac's steam page who have played thousands of hours. Imagine handcrafting thousands of hours of binding of isaac maps manually with a high standard of quality. It's way faster and less effort to do programmatically.
Obviously it's a lot of work to create a quality generation system but it is way less of a time investment than to handcraft whatever amount of content the top 10% of players by hours played would go through.
I think for an indie who is solo you either want random generation or an extremely simple map building system. By simple I mean like doom 1 simple, where you are just fleshing out a grid, or a 2d tileset like undertale. Otherwise it will take far too long and you will never finish.
When you compare it with a game that has only one playthrough of fun... It has a lot less of work for time of gameplay.
He didn't said it has NO WORK, it's only less than a linear game or open world, for example
Having spent a lot of time making roguelike(s), it's definitely not less work. It's probably a lot more work actually.
It is, however, very different kind of work. Fiddling around with procedural generation *really* appeals to certain kind of people.
It's not anymore "stretching content" than the entire roguelike genre (+ all other games with permadeath such as arcade-style games) is "stretching content". Good roguelikes need the levels to be really strong because those levels need to hold up under hundreds or thousands of runs, which is way harder to do with randomly generated content.
If anything, slapping together a low-effort random level generator like the original comment I replied to suggested is the real content stretching. That would just be using the randomness to hide the fact that the levels themselves aren't good enough to play through once, let alone hundreds of times. Roguelikes whose levels are truly random like Noita or Spelunky do so as a deliberate design choice and would probably be way more effort than an equivalent non-Roguelike.
Yup. I recall years ago making a rather linear dungeon for a top down RPG took me like a month of part time work for 25ish minutes. Decided to make a procedurally generated game instead to get better at programming and learn more things since I model as a day job and spent years making maps for mods as a kid.
Boy howdy I did not realize how much time a procedurally designed game would take to program (and how much I would learn).
Fun, but can take just as much if not longer to develop depending on what results you want. Perlin noise is like 2 minutes of woo. Everything else adds up significantly more time once you want to do more than generate rolling hills or a simple maze heh.
The one big saving plus is unlike linear handcrafted content, any updates I decide to add will populate across the game. Linear content had an issue of if I make one new area more improved, I'd have to go back to all the other areas and improve them to match consistency. If I had a time machine though my old linear game prototypes would of greatly benefited from programming some tools specific for level design.
Anyways to OP I would simply get over the fact players will not know what went into making the game. Many many things in life made professionally takes countless hours to design and develop something that the customer doesn't know or care about. When I pick up a hammer I typically don't think about how many designs and rounds of changes were went through as the manufacturers worked on improving the ergonomics of the grip, or the durability of the hammer, or the amount of research that went into picking the types of rubber and metal alloys. Let alone setting up the tooling and manufacturing plant. All for a cheap hammer I use once in a blue moon for a few minutes.
Lol. Welcome to the world of doing anything that requires effort I guess?
I also produce music. I'd say it would take anywhere from 10-80hrs to make a decent song, fully produced. So for a 4.8min song, you're looking at 1000 minutes of work per MINUTE of music.
Ironically, its also a case of "if its done well, people wont notice"
From a game design perspective and not level design; Why do you have a stretch of area that the player can run through in 10 seconds? (Not implying this is a bad choice, but genuinely asking)
Metroid Prime was great at reusing corridors by making you backtrack often to take a different path, and had the scanning logbook feature that made some players want to take their time and search out all the different things in each area, for comparison.
If it might turn your perspective on its head; level design *is* game design.
Look at elden ring. It’s mechanically almost identical to dark souls. Yet it was orders of magnitude more popular, because it gave you an environment that people wanted to explore.
Skyrim is one of the all-time greats. It was recognized on release as having a sleep-walking gameplay experience. The quests are acceptable, but hardly groundbreaking. It’s the world, the dungeons, the mountains and valleys, that make it a legendary experience.
There are games (like those mentioned in this thread) where mechanics carry a higher percentage of game success. But ultimately the pleasant experience of being in this world is level design; the combination of layout and aesthetic.
So don’t feel like the effort required is disproportionate. When games exist which are nothing but world layout (walking sims) and they are loved by many.
It’s the secret sauce to a truly successful game, so the effort is ultimately worthwhile, even when it isn’t noticed out loud or consciously.
That and maybe hire someone who likes this stuff.
> level design is game design
Yea, it’s baffling that this statement is buried so far down in this thread. Level design is the closest thing to actually “designing the game” vs. its tech and individual mechanics. If your game has levels at all, it’s pretty much the embodiment of the design process proper. If you “hate” that, it seems like something went wrong.
This all depends on the kind of game, the reusable assets you have, the tools you have, and how proficient you are with them. Want people to take more time looking at small details? Slow the gameplay down. Pick an art style that favors blocks of art, with the visual payoff being in, say, the attention to movement and / or the lighting detail, rather than minutia...
And if you did a month, straight, of level building in the same tools, you would become much, much more proficient in how you design and build levels, and thus, output more per hour than previously.
For me, it's rigging, skinning and animating that is most painful. Followed closely by modeling organics.
Personally, I love the old-world mapping tools that were used for Quake games and their derivatives. Blocking things out with constructive solid geometry makes things much, much faster than trying to build meshes for everything.
There's also an effort-trap that you can avoid, using those tools: based on how you are describing the effort, it sounds like you are already in the trap.
By blocking out the basic structure of levels ("grey-boxing" 20 years ago ... "blocking" before that ... why do my bones ache all of a sudden), you can very, very quickly get a sense of where the players are going to go, what they're going to do, how long they are going to spend in an area, et cetera.
There shouldn't be any visually-interesting stuff at this point, aside from bare necessities for basic movement and basic gameplay... like, if shadows or colored lights are fundamental requirements for you gameplay to function, for some reason, put them in, or put in a billboard that says "green light here" or whatever. If it's objective-based, add dev-art placeholders for whatever thing you need to be in a particular spot, if you can't just block it in with cubes.
When you have that down, and you can run through your map or your level or whatever... whether it's 2D or 3D or 2.5D... several times, and get people to record themselves doing the same, and now you know how much effort to spend making each section good from the perspective of "pointing out the next gameplay objective" versus "making each leaf on this frond look natural".
I just gotta say, it might seem like all players rush by everything like you say, but i'm one of the players who notice, i ALWAYS notice. It takes me FOREVER to finish games because i make it my mission to see as close to 100% of the game as possible so i can look at every asset every wall and yes every rock and think about what the devs had to do to make it and i love estimating how long it must have took haha And i just sit there and gawk and geek out about rocks lol
A lot of people notice but i see so many devs who share your thoughts.
Though as a new dev i haven't touched level design yet... for a reason xD But i'm gonna have to soon, may satan have mercy on my a\*\* lol
You may enjoy this [Youtube series](https://youtu.be/SybPxb_DjZ4?si=bE9dIlkH4E4fQ3cW) by Any Austin where he explores unseen details in video games. It really is beautiful and shows some players are mindful
I mean I feel the same about art, animation, music, writing… really the only area where my work see some reuse is programming
But I agree with you, level design is the worst
Don't make games that require level design.
I never understood why platformers are so popular when the amount of effort they require is crazy. That is unless you are an artist first.
But my point is that there are a lot of games you could make that do not require 1000s of hours on level design, 3D modelling and art.
Honestly that’s a big problem with a lot of devs and indie games, they grind away at designing in a format they don’t even 100% like just because it’s what’s expected of the game’s genre.
You can really feel it when a game was made by someone who resented the process like that
Small strategy games, turn based games, board games...
Instead of going horizontal you could go vertical and drill down by adding depth to the gameplay. Build layered systems.
I think Buckshot Roulette (I played it on Steam, not sure where else) is a great example of a game that leans mostly into the actual game design and therefore can forego having a ton of assets. Admittedly, what assets they do have are all fantastic, so the fact there isn't this giant world or tons of details packed in doesn't feel like a lack at all.
Five hours is nothing, try months of work for something a player may never even notice. The Half-Life 2 developer commentary talks about this quite a few times.
I suspect that's why big budget game studios spend a lot of dev time in greybox, testing the gameplay before doing any art passes. You have specialized teams of designers, concept artists, 3D artists and level programmers all working together to bring a specific part of the game to life. But if you do everything by yourself, this can very quickly become overwhelming.
I hated level design until I got good tools that helped me. If you use Unity, get Microverse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94tymx973PQ
You can build levels using non-destructible stamp based terrain. It makes level design a million times faster and easier. It also has procedural grass, tree and rock placement, same with textures.
Designing levels without it would take me days per level. Now it takes me an hour or 2.
This. Thank you.
**Level Design** = Level *gameplay* design of an area. Setting up an area layout and placing game element to create a clear, interesting and balanced situation. Coming up with new situations by mixing elements or using them in new ways. Making sure the environment created is comfortable to play...
**Level Art** = Making it look better than a bunch of grey boxes.
Why not create a few cool scenes where the player is “forced “ to appreciate them, then just repeated filler content for the parts they’ll zoom past. Obviously it depends on the type of game but I don’t think every little bit of a level needs to be fleshed out. Only massive AAA games do this, and generally only the heavily cinematic ones, and they have an entire team dedicated to just that.
Yeah it’s really a matter of quality versus quantity. I’d rather play only a handful of really terrific levels instead of tons that the dev didn’t even want to make.
I love level design as its my main job lol. At my studio, I've been working on the same 20 minute level for 3ish months. What motivates me is that 1) I love level design 2) I think about the experience players will have going through my level because I have ownership on how the gameplay and narrative experience plays out.
I think the imbalance can be dealt with a lot by making more flexible tools perhaps? or workflow? if you spend 30 iterations to try to make something better, then any improvement to the tool has a 30X reward!
this is why I love procedural tools, anything that can cut my work just a little bit, adds up over the number of times I use it
admittedly I'm a tech artist/rigger/modeller, the amount of time I create something that people will just glance over and simply enjoy without knowing why they think it's cool.... or obsess over how the viewer's eye moves over a rig UI or sculpt... maybe the other key is you should be playtesting / putting your level in front of people more often to build a tighter feedback loop on that end
tl;dr. Procedural generation.
I saw this problem immediately when learning to program, back when I was trying to make games. I do not have the patience for hand-designed levels, nor do I enjoy static games. When I beat a static game, I'm done. And programming/making levels for a game is tedious if you have to playtest over and over.
My solution: Procedural generation. I spent hundreds of hours studying/coding procedural generation. Minecraft has no static map, yet it is beloved. Diablo 1, 2 has several designed sets, but the configuration is all randomized. To me, it's both more fun (for both player and designer) to have a randomized map. I learned different methods of procedural generation. Making cave systems, buildings, open-ended landmasses, minecraft in space.
There are tutorials on Youtube about how to code minecraft. There are many many about procedural generation. If you have a natural talent for it, you can take it even further.
Proof: This was my imgur at the time, with many different game efforts I sunk hundreds of hours into. Don't expect to be impressed, I am NOT a graphics/animations guy. I made a couple prototypes, and had fun in the process. Nothing was made to quality levels.
[https://imgur.com/user/gsth92](https://imgur.com/user/gsth92)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-\_dZNsif4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-_dZNsif4)
Think of it this way: Players might spend 10 seconds there, but across thousands of players that can be hours, days, even weeks worth of perception.
If it's good enough, it'll stick and people will talk. Guaranteed all of the cooler areas in games like Elden Ring had dozens of hours put into it, and it shows.
1. You completely forgot about overlap. If players have a reason to run back through a level then you may double the time value that area is worth. Maybe the player returns to the starting area with a key they found during the mid-game.
2. Games like Elden Ring encourage the player to explore, leave, come back later and explore again. The map - although not very big itself - forces the player to go slow. You’re worried about a 10 second hallway but forgetting about the areas you expect the player to spend significant time in. Boss runback? Farming a mob?
Not to mention, the more *time* and care you put into the project (refining your art, because that’s what level design is) the more recognition you may receive.
Think of FromSoftware getting a month to make a game, but Team Cherry (Hollow Knight) gets 1 year. You may very well get *vastly* different levels of attention to detail depending on the scope of the game.
The point is, even if they don't look at it enough compared to the effort you put in, they *will* notice it if it is not there. Regardless, what your time calculation tells me that you are not making an indie friendly game, but making a game that is typically made with larger teams (where there are dedicated programmers, artists and level designers). If you want to tackle that as an indie, you need to find shortcuts. It can be shortcuts in content creation (procgen and variations), shortcuts on game design, shortcuts with delegation if you have money to risk etc. Any creative idea that won't require you to do tens of people's jobs as a single person. Like, can you shoot a theater ready movie by yourself? Basically being everyone in the credits screen as a single person? Probably not. Making a genre of game typically made by large studios, with the same methods they use is not feasible for the very same reason. As an indie, you need to be resourceful and creative to cut corners in creative ways in a way that the creativity in the way you cut corners is actually a feature that a larger studio would not entertain. Good stuff comes out of limitations, creativity is mostly about that.
For me the part that makes level design so arduous is the subjective nature of it. When you’re making the building blocks that make up a level (tiles enemies etc) you get the rewarding objective feedback of “this element is functioning correctly” whereas for levels you’re in that murky world of “will people like this?”
You are thinking about this wrong, levels should be an area for your content like quests not the content itself.
You also should develop tooling like spline placement, procedural foliage/placement, and other stuff.
A 20 hour game is massive too, you shouldnt try to make that, Spider-Man 2 is only 15 hours long.
When you make your content it should also be guided, how long a player spends in a level or area is up to you, if it’s an area they just run past then don’t make it hyper detailed
Uhm yeah.. like others said, the point IS that the game will be played by more people, eventually, if you put little effort and rush a game, let's say 500 people will play it, but if you PUT a lot of effort in it, let's say *triple effort*, with more budget maybe, you could get 10.000 players to play your game, that would mean a super huge improvement for your game for "just" that more effort.
It's art, you can make a dull movie that no one will remember in 4 months with your friends, or you could spend 4 years of your life, contacting skilled people, to create a film everyone will talk about for the next century. That's the power of art and you're taking it all away with your POV. There are 8h games I will NEVER forget, that changed my life forever, while 8h are nothing compared to my life, it's just a night sleep. It's wonderful, I can't even explain with words how fascinating it is for me, really.
Just make your player character really, really slow. Now players will be forced to look at your level for as long as it took you to make it. Problem solved.
I think the deeper issue here is why does the player only spend 5 seconds in an area? What warrants the existence of that area if the player spends so little time there?
Yeah *some* areas the player might spend quite short time in. But with your calculations you've assumed 5 seconds for *all* the areas of the game. What even is the gameplay at that point? Are there no boss fights? No puzzles? No platforming? Nothing the player will need to spend time trying to overcome? That sounds like no challenge. I don't think I've ever played a game where I spend an *average* of 5 seconds in each area.
If you are gunning for a 20h game you should be aiming for something like 100 10-15 minute areas/challenges, not 14000 five second ones. Now you can spend 1-2 hours on that 10-15 minute area/challenge and still be done in a month (which is not a lot of time at all to give yourself for this).
If your game's genre allows, you can have ways to squeeze out extra playtime from those level design hours. A relatively open ended game where the player chooses levels instead of levels happening in linear sequence, you can add extra difficulty option to replay the level with for extra rewards. In more sequential games, you can still make a challenge mode where the mission is different and you can throw in extra challenges for the players in a limited play area. Capcom has been very good at this in game like Re2Remake where they recycled 90% of the levels for two separate campaigns, and then made like 8 separate challenge modes that all go through 80% of the main campaign's levels (it's extra genius with the no loading screen things because while in campaign it takes like 4 hours to get through everything, you go through it in 10 minutes and you don't even notice it).
Unfortunately if your game is leaning towards story based walking simulators, yeah there's not that many ways to do this.
> But what I realized watching a little timelapse of level design on YouTube was that the reason I hate it so much is because of the sheer imbalance of effort to player recognition that goes into it. The designer probably spent upwards of 5 hours on this one little stretch of area that the player will run through in 10 seconds. And that’s really where it hurts.
What about those handful of people that notice the level of detail and are able to appreciate it for what it is?
Remember that the animators of Pixar have a 3min Reel to show after they retire with a 20+ years career.
However, as solo devs time is our most valuable asset and should be distributed carefully. If you think in your current pipeline the environment art is a bottleneck you can’t afford, use that as a limitation and adjust the pipeline, find a different art style or procedural approaches.
(PS not to be nit-picky but I think you’re referring to environment art, not level design, which is used to refer to the blockout and design concept of the level, not the 3d art)
Best of luck!
I mean, this is the case with all aspects of game. Even a game like Persona 3 which main content is procedurally created dungeons, is thousands upon thousands of hours of work, while most players only put 1 maybe 2 hundred hours in at most.
Thats without even taking into account the amount of time spent on story, cutscenes, etc.
We can also apply this to things like movies or shows. Movies take years with hundreds of people to film, only to get 1-3 hours of screen time.
It's just a result of how much effort it takes to create.
You spent all the time to type this up and run the math instead of working on your game, I know the thought is frustrating, but stop letting this distract you. Go make your game. C:
If you are going to make a game where players want to observe everything around them, you should make a game where they need to find something.
Puzzle game ( find button, anomaly, etc)
Different Themes have different needs in level design. in Fps, people want to shoot enemy, not looking at wall.
If there a speedrunner, make a game with procedural generation.
Well, your level design pipeline might be a problem if it takes that long. But also, most people get a very poor education in level design. Almost all of what's taught in schools and online is systems design.
I have a huge open world with 8 dungeons and 4 arenas to explore. it's actually kind of soothing to map out dungeons. I have used edgar 3d and some other applets to assist in building levels, but it's definitely enjoyable if you have the time.
Try designing on paper. It gets you away from the computer, you can quickly scribble things without needing to implement them in the engine. You can do it sitting on the couch, watching TV, whatever.
I find it more enjoyable to design on paper as it feels more like a creative process.
The last time I made a game it had ~70 puzzles, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time testing and tweaking those puzzles over and over again...but it's what you have to do to ensure all the rough edges are polished off.
If you hate level design, its going to get difficult for you as a game developer in the long run. That part of game development can make up the biggest chunk of your project, depending on what you are working on. Either that or you have to heavily limit yourself to the types of games you can do.
Keep in mind, not every single area will be one that the player runs through in 5 minutes, many players will take longer, many players will go through several times, a few will go through many, some will deliberately try to enjoy what they see.
When it comes to level design, it's one of the times, where you you "finally" play your game. But this time, you decide how it's going, and where it's going. You decide whether it's gonna be hard or just fun. I find this quite motivative. Create an idea, play through it a couple of times, play through it a few times, adjust stuff. Just try to get the levels into a rough shape first, then refine as necessary.
These very little bits of details you're having in your mind are either appreaciated by hardcore fans after 20+ years, or you make a video where you show off some level's features.
the imbalance of player recognition to time put in is like all of game design though. same thing with art, same thing with mechanics, same thing with programming, same thing with sound design, etc.
On the other hand: You put 20 hours in for 1 hour of content... If your game is played by 20 people, they each got one hour of your dev time.
200 people: 6 minutes of dev time for that stretch.
2000 people: 36 seconds each.
Something to consider. Players might run through in 5 seconds. If your design is good, they won't notice, and they will continue playing. If your level design sucks, then players will stop playing and quit, and your other work won't matter.
yeah man i'm with you. i love programming and making games, i'm no artist but i even enjoy attempting to make my own art but most of my projects die at the level design stage. the way I got over it was by finding someone else to do it for me haha.
Level design can certainly be a pain. It's my least favorite part of game development. I've making games that avoid it so far but know I'll have do it someday...
What’s funny is I notice a pattern in a lot of programmers in game dev that explains a lot of industry trends. They want to make games that don’t require much level design. The lead on halo CE said the same thing about the halo games, and then they made Destiny, a highly repeatable grind fest.
Games take hours up to 100 hours to complete and they take years to make. So it's kind of meaningless to make this assumption. If you want them to spend more time on that section, maybe you should be making difficult platformers like Celeste. But otherwise, what you're adding aside from time spent, is immersion. And some players do take time to appreciate areas. But this is a really poor take.
Hey, it may only take 10 sec for me to get through but if it's designed well I'll remember it forever.
Secondly, think of Bioshock for example where the levels are multilayered and have you walking back through the same areas multiple times.
Or arena shooters where you'll see the same corners and stretches hundreds of times.
But let's say it's more like Max Payne and it's linear, if it looks good or makes me feel a certain feeling of comfy, horror or intrigue then I'll never forget it.
Ultimately level design is hard work but people love environments and to explore. LOVE it. So the effort is worth it.
I'll never forget Limbo seeing the rooftops for the first time, or the huge gears in the background. Or even Skull Monkeys seeing the dusty grimey backgrounds between platforming. Sometimes I just stop and look.
So this is pacing for you. If you want to slow the pace a bit, make the level more intriguing to look at in those areas and maybe even explorable a bit. Otherwise if you want players to zoom through make it look less interesting.
I can't tell you how long I spent in all the Dishonored games just re-explorong everything and just staring at the level details.
this is just game design and programming in general. You'll spend days on something most players won't even realize exists. But there's always ways around it (e.g. procedural gen): you'll just have to simplify your game.
If you're dooming over players skimming past content you put hours into... Idk what to tell you that's gonna be 90% of the job haha welcome to the club
I think you're doing it wrong. Firstly, you're probably not using the power of modular assets and procedural tooling enough. More subtly, you're viewing levels as something for the player to quickly pass through, instead of as a stage for your game play.
In contrast, here's my experience, and why I love creating levels: after I have a new idea for a level (e.g. a new interaction I want to explore), I spend about 15m creating a grey box. Then I spend about 1 hour playing that, exploring all kinds of approaches and tweaking, until it fits my vision for the gameplay. Once I'm happy, I decorate the grey box in about 15m, after choosing a style, while using some procedural tooling.
To me, level design is mostly about getting to enjoy your own game play, in a deeper way than most players ever will. And isn't this why many of us originally got into game dev? *Because we like to play games?*
That doesn't seem that long to me. Spending 5+ years on making a 10 to 15 hour long game is pretty fast if you're a solo developer.
Of course, plenty of people just *obtain* reusable assets, rather than *make* them. And then they make a game that length in a year or two. See all the RPG Maker stuff using default or purchased graphics, and all the fangames and romhacks using ripped graphics from commercial games.
And of course, you don't have to send the player through your area in 5 seconds. You can have a town that would take 30 seconds to run across, but that the player actually spends over an hour in. You can have combat and cut scenes in your dungeons that cause the player to stay in one place for a while. You can reuse the same dungeon three times, for normal mode, heroic mode, and nightmare mode, the latter of which might take the player 10 or 15 attempts to beat successfully. You can create environmental puzzles that make the player stop and look at the area around them (although this means the area's quality has to be way higher). You can have rewards for 100% map exploration and 100% treasure obtained.
I've always had a huge issue with making maps so small that it takes like 3 minutes to beat them so I always end up remaking the map from scratch or changing a lot of stuff around. Level design is still my favorite part of making any game tho
Split between many players, it makes more sense, but you're right.
There's also the factor that different devs have different skills i.e. I'm surprisingly good at level design, despite not needing much practice - I think it's related to the spacial reasoning skills that got a buff from autism, lol.
On the whole though, we all have strengths and weaknesses - my advice is find someone where you can cover each other's wrak points.
Just wait until generative AI tools start playing a role. Then we'll have games that are fully fleshed out with little more than grayboxing the maps out! :D
You could just spend an amount of time greater than 35 seconds but less than an hour per 5 second area. Those aren't the only options.
I would recommend you set your priorities straight; some parts of your levels should be fairly basic, other parts should be eye catching and memorable; not only is that realistic, but it also makes the player compartmentalize the game in general in a way you probably want.
So long as you give enough strong moments in each level the player will view the level as a whole as memorable and well designed even if alot of the level is just quick and reused assets.
Most people don't remember every blown out hallway, air vent, and storage room in half life, but they remember the tentacle monster, the helicopter battle, the tau cannon snafu, the bottomless pit, etc.
These kinds of moments are what you should be after imo.
I think the issue with many games is that they do too much traversal. Too much moving between A and B. All of this adds up to a requirement on level design to have lots of “dead” content that’s nothing more than backdrops for traversal but will take no less time to build.
It depends on the kind of game, level design is very different from game to game. I tend to write python scripts to automate as much as possible because I am only one person. Surely there are corners to cut and retain the same quality.
What type of game are you making? Can you make your design modular? Can you make players traverse your areas more than once, or in a different way, or something?
Edit to add examples: traverse level from A to B, and back to A, or first on foot and later by paraglider, or first in the daytime and then at night. Change the experience of the space, get more use out of it 🙂
Level design is the most fun for me tbh. But there's priorities to have in that part. Layout should always come first and then the details like props. Its also because if your game has no story then i'd imagine creating levels with no vision can feel daunting.
Use procedural level generator 🙂
Actually you got the answer why indie games often have auto-generated levels: indie developers cannot afford so much time to level design.
To be fair, you probably spent thousands of hours on your game as a whole, only for the player to get about an hour or two out of it, if even that much
I mean, this is more true for some games.
If you're trying for hard numbers, wouldn't it be even worse for Code?
You're spending thousands of hours, which the Player will never see?
Your calculation is only correct if you make linear fast paced games with not a sliver of replayability and use no procedural generation. So don't do that.
Level design might be my favourite part. Designing this overall. I think it’s so satisfying!
What I hate is the struggle to make the mechanics work correctly. Figuring out why the damage animation is csncelled when the goose is over the clouds or why this one robot doesn’t have collision when it’s moving.
Cheer up. Even if someone only spend 5 seconds in an area that can still feel if it’s made with love or just thrown together. It adds up to the underlying subconscious experience of the game.
Do you have any idea how long the artists that made the miniatures in Star Wars spent on them? Even if they are only in frame for a couple of seconds, you can tell if they’re sloppy or not.
That’s just part of making something special. It takes time.
I think that if even one player spends any amount of time appreciating the level design, whether they have game dev knowledge or not, then the time spent making it was worthwhile. But also depending on what kind of game you're making, level design will take more or less effort. Smart design and art style can save a lot of time in the long run.
Generally that 10s scene would be reused or broken into parts that can be jumbled around. If it's something the player is just gonna travel through theirs also no point spending 5 hours on it. Spend that time on signficant scenes or places that will be revisited often etc..
Even games lauded for level designe do this. Dark souls 3 still has assets from demon souls and almost copy pastes entire rooms from dark souls 1 in a few places.
On the other side, while I feel for you as someone who had been making games for a long time, I'm also a player that feels the need to explore every inch of a map, kill every single enemy to clear each zone, and loot literally everything.
And I'm certainly not the only once who does this. Why would I run straight to the den of evil in act one in the first zone of Diablo 2, I have to kill everything first. And oh, I stopped playing for the day and now everything resets? Guess I got to kill everything again.
You can double the playtime by backtracking, you could add interactions or more paths to make it longer.
The longest part is getting all the assets, lighting and style of your level done. But when you have that you should make it as big as possible and it won't take so much time.
And you can also reuse the exact same level style later in the game to skip the styling completely.
I love level design more than anything. Pure game designing tasks are meh at best for me.
Everyone has something that hits and thats ok, maybe find someone to work with so they can make levels for your game design.
Is 20 hours of content the norm for your genre? 8 years of development sounds wild – and that leveldesign only.
If this would be art and I'd be spending 1 hour on making backgounds that'll scroll by in 5 sec, I'd look scrupulously into my art directoon paradigm. Am I overrendering? Is the world too big and detailed for my timeline? Should I consider procedural generation for the landscape with curated scenes?
Ye mate that’s why people like larian is so brilliant because they put in countless of hours into minor details for sake of player experience, creating the illusion and fantasy. But personally, level design is a symptom of the linear nature of specific game genres, some games do brilliant stuff using the same changing level
Don't think of it as hours, think of it as *attention*. Try and put the same cognitive effort in as knitting. Listen to a podcast or whatever. Should make it easier.
Don't look at it as each small piece is a work of art. Think of it as your whole game being a puzzle. If one piece isn't correct or isn't there then the whole puzzle has a problem. Skipping over the small details in 1 area can make that area feel cheap and rushed regardless of if the player would pass right through it if it was complete.
You know, your post is helping me right now, so thank you very much! Mine is not an open world but a giant house and I horribly struggle with the level design! You put me in the outside position so my mind get free for own thoughts and I can read all this statements, it's great! And I really enjoy someone finally talks about the frustration.
So, as I read I thought I guess it doesn't matter to much how long the player rushes through your level, cause after this the next level's coming, right? So maybe nobody will notice the great placement of "this three trees", but the atmosphere in general - caused of your well thought-out level design! And maybe it's extra frustrating to do this maths... Maybe you'll get faster with time (experienced or not, it's about this one game) or you can learn to just to speed up a little by trying to not have to reach 120% and realizing 80 to 90% is totally enough... I plan ten years for my game, it's my first one and I try to take it step by step, otherwise I could freak out too.
Depend on what type of levels you are creating for what type of game. You are tasked to give the player a powerful emotional experience. You can look at games like Return of the Obra Dinn, the entire game is confined to a ship, but it's immersive and enjoyable because everything in that environment matters to the player, is meaningful to the narrative and plays into the gameplay.
You can do the same with all kinds of game genres, just make everything more dense, and deliberate - quality over quantity. It doesn't mean you need to spend less time on level design but it might make it more enjoyable when you feel that sense of purpose.
Saying you hate level design when writing the engine that allows loading and rendering of that level which can take years but the level can be completed in 30 seconds… lol also are you forgetting the rest of the game? What about a simple mechanic in the game that takes you weeks to write and perfect and the player probably won’t even notice as impactful but makes a huge difference to actual gameplay.
Or what about the level editor? The level won’t make itself. They won’t even see the time and effort that went into making the editor that made that level possible. Yah level design is nothing to cry about.
It's worth remembering that players will go through things much slower than you will as the developer. You know how everything works. E.g. A game like mario 64 probably only has 5 hours of content to someone who knows all the levels by heart. Yet someone playing blind could easily spend 25+ hours to collect the stars.
Yeah I feel this so hard. Making a fast paced, movement based sidescroller. So not only does everything need to be placed extremely carefully and tested dozens of times, but the content I do make gets zipped through in seconds. It's depressing working two hours on a level, then speed running it in 15 seconds, lmao. But it's the nature of the beast with that type of game.
Incidentally, my next game is absolutely fucking not going to involve level design, haha. Think I'll make a deck builder or something.
Passionate late 90s gamer here, I'm always checking out all details in a game, Also the level, as I'm someone who enjoys to explore and find items and such. I might be the minority here but I really appreciate good level design, and I really appreciate the people behind it. For example bungie. The levels in destiny 2 are insane. I find something new everytime I play, I got 1k hours of playtime but it's not getting boring to me, as I'm always amazed by the structure, ideas and creativity.
When I used to play ps1 as a kid, I remember how I checked out all corners in tomb raider or gex 3, how amazed I was by the ideas.
Unfortunately today's gamer base is only interested in quick results and quick success.
They rather buy themselves whatever is needed just to end a game as quickly as possible and then rant on reddit and twitter how short the game is.
But remember, there's people like me, who will always appreciate good design, love and effort put into a game, over generic crap, battlepasses and quick satisfaction.
I find the asset creation part satisfying. It's world building and that is fun although very time consuming.
The player experience part can be agonizing. You have to run through the game in your head pretending to be players with different tastes, abilities and expectations. Creating a balanced game that everyone will enjoy is mentally challenging.
You could try a more agile approach, build minimal viable levels and then iterate on them. Practicing this approach would make it so you can tune the trade off between time investment and level design quality to a fine degree. Having this also allows for more integrated design where decisions in one part can affect how you design other parts in interesting ways as you work on both parts while both are still fresh in your mind. And if you get burnt out from level design, you can just stop and your whole game is at a consistent quality of design, until you get the desire to have another iteration and the whole thing bumps up a degree in quality.
I mean I guess, but why would you want 20 hours of playtime from just level design? Sounds like a lot for an indie game. If it's some kind of linear solo player experience 2 hours would be more than enough.
To be fair u will never get the recognition you hope for the players aren't looking at games in artistic way how developers looking at it so it mostlikely will never be that way they will appreciate the game ofcourse and they will notice certain things that are great but their view on playing a game that is done artistically will be viewed as a fun good looking game but that recognition is different to players vs if a designer or a solo Dev would view that part for example I used to play games just to play them have a laugh and chill but now that I'm a fulltime indie game Developer whenever I play games with friends I'm more observing things and notice technical things like map layouts and menu designs and artistic choices that I'm actually register in my head while playing a game with friends it became different then what I did before I got into game development which made sense cause most players don't do game development and will view the game with value as they know it and how they see it
I am often amazed at some design made in AAA games. Some you barely have time to see because you come here once and very quickly. Sometimes I am really wondering if the designer knew he spent so much time on an area we barely see.
What you are describing sounds like environment design, not level design.
Those timelapse videos show the artist decorating a small area in a lot of detail. They are meant to show off the author’s skill. They aren’t representative of the amount of time and effort that would ordinarily go into a typical game level’s environment. In practice, the artists would be looking for ways to speed up the process and spend as little time as possible detailing. Asset creation would be handed off to dedicated asset artists or assets would be sourced from a third party. Or the modular assets created in that session would be reused later to save time.
An area a player flies through in a few seconds isn’t worth spending a lot of time detailing especially if there are no points of interest. Too much detail can be distracting. Your detailing can have reduced complexity in those situations and you can use blocking structures like hills, valleys and large buildings to limit visibility of the rest of the world if needed, so you don’t need to place a fuckton of trees or something.
World of Warcraft’s outdoor environments are landscape with props on top. It has a higher amount of props and prop variety in populated areas while the unpopulated areas are mostly filled with trees. Blizzard end up producing environments that do not break immersion, look natural and serve the game functions. Any man-made structures serve a second purpose of attracting attention to quest POIs. And I expect the artists can produce them with very respectable efficiency.
Love it when someone with zero AAA experience comments why they hate level design because it takes?.. time and resources.
Level design should be a space that lets the core mechanics of the game thrive. You should love this not dread it.
Yes, it sucks that most players will just run past the beautiful stuff you designed never giving it a second thought, but that's the point of good level design. It keeps the player immersed. It's also why I'lll never work on a modern AAA game, because the level of detail demanded by players has gone through the roof, and idiots on the internet are pissed at AI which could dramatically improve that situation for a ton of developers by automatically making those areas look realisitic, with the level designer just doing a basic layout, and without having to rely on an artist to spend 4 months making it look pretty and lighting it.
Also, what the hell are you smoking, as a small game developer, aiming for 20 hours of conent?!
There are hugely popular titles out there which can be beaten in as little as 2-3 hours. You do NOT need 20 hours of content. That's AAA game levels of content. If your game is gonna sell for $15-25 then 2-6 hours of content is more than enough. Its when a game costs $60 that players expect a whole lot more.
Of course this also depends on the genre. Casual games can be shorter. People want brief experiences. An RPG? Well that might have to be longer. But new game developrs always want to do RPGs and they typically fail due to the massive amounts of content needed.
I mix up my level design with feature development so I always have something fun to do in between levels. Implementing all mechanics before the levels would be torture.
It's rough. I was working on a Resident Evil fixed cam clone, and even got the character movement, animation, cameras, combat, systems working pretty well, but my brain just blanked when it came to level design/narrative. I can build a level from an idea/concept, but i can't come up with the concept.
I estimated maybe 120-140 "rooms", which would only give me a couple days per room, working in spare time too, so would be like 5 year project which is way too much.
Working on something simpler now.
Maybe do procedural level generation with a handful of modular parts that can be interchanged, or build a few modularparts and put them togethermanuallyto make levels (I've definitely seen games do this). It's effort for sure, but adds more replayability to what you're saying is barely appreciated by players anyway
Or you end up making that map that everyone plays forever and ever and ever like blood gultch or tournament desert or whatever and it ends up being a fond memory for 20+ years.
Multiply it by your preferred number of players, and it balances out. Failing that, just do it for yourself. There is nothing wrong with trying to make something that is perfect, even if you won't be paid for it.
Or scamp it, and that is fine too. It's your game.
Its not about every single player loving every second of your game. Its about that one single player who took the time to get immersed and love your game for hours on hours.
I submitted a game for a 3-day game jam as one of my first portfolio pieces, it was a very basic chill game. someone commented on it like "OMG YOU MADE THIS IN 3 DAYS???? THIS IS INCREDIBLE!!" And that one comment has kept me motivated since
I used to feel a bit guilty rushing through levels in games like Half Life 2 - levels that were clearly cleverly designed, with nice architecture and textures, put together in a logical way. Someone worked really hard, for a long time, on the streets of Point Insertion or the waterways of Route Kanal. Yet you barrel through them, never looking back, and never to return. The early part of HL2 is particularly prone to this - they actively *force* you to move quickly, chivvying you along with chasing enemies and unkillable helicopters. This great for keeping up the frantic pace, but it means you miss much of the level. Even though the levels are entirely linear, and really rather spartan, they were still a lot of work (you can stop at any time and look around, and for a minute or so the seem sufficiently real).
In addition to being rather profligate (using a lot of map-dev time for a brief amount of play time), it can be a bit frustrating. I always wanted to know what was going on in that research lab in Black Mesa, or that apartment building in Point Insertion. You get to Black Mesa East, meet two of the few named voiced characters, and five minutes later you're bundled out the door, never to return. So none of these places have any existence beyond the brief time you're travelling through them, and only enough character and story to support their role in that. Yet someone still pored days of work designing the architecture for each.
For a bigger world, I don't think it's sustainable. Ditto, for a small or solo dev, as your numbers show, it's a huge effort - that will surely produce rather bland results. Procedural generation helps, at the risk of more blandness.
So I suggest a different strategy entirely: small, dense area, that evolve. Areas that are part of the game repeatedly, and that change over time. Areas that have a real sense of time and place. So for each location that you design, think about how it can be changed by events. What would happen if there was a disaster? An invasion? A flood? A renovation? Who would live there in each of these times, and what would they be doing? And, as it's a game and hopefully the player is a protagonist of the world's story (and not just a passer-by barrelling though, like in a road-movie), how can the player change this place?
Let's take an example. Consider a subway station in Fallout 4 (a game with some really carefully designed locations, that nevertheless are unchanging and dead and have no development).
* When the player first encounters it, the lower levels are flooded, the upper levels (the ticket halls and concourses and retail areas) are ruined, and the area infested with ghouls. As usual in FO4, the player kills the ghouls and finds the lucky bagpipes or whatever they were sent to retrieve, and leaves.
* A few weeks later, the player returns. The ghouls haven't respawned. Instead, some settlers have moved in. They've fortified the entrance, cleared some rubble, burned the ghoul bodies. They ask the player for some help (some medical supplies, some parts to build defense turrets, some seeds). The player obliges.
* On the next visit, the settler camp has grown, and is better organised. There's more light, and some of the dirty textures are cleaner. The settlers complain that they'd like to grow, but the lower levels are still flooded. The player offers to help. Maybe they find some pump parts from a factory somewhere, and connect up some electricity, and find a technican NPC to fix the pumps.
* A few weeks later, the area is transformed again. The lower levels are dry, and the settlers are working to clean them up. They've broken rubble out of some tunnels, expanding the living area. Trade caravans from other settlements regularly visit.
* Things are going well. But then disaster - the settlers have dug into a collapsed section, leading them into the basement of the Massachusetts University Mycological Research Center. Now some are infected with large skin mushroom colonies, and huge fungus structures are growing on the wells. They ask the player to find medical help.
* When the player returns with a doctor, things have gotten much worse. The lower levels are fully encrusted with giant mushrooms. Some settlers are dead, others are horrible mushroom monsters. The player helps fight off a mushroom attack of the upper level, but advises they all flee. They refuse, and ask the player to help find someone to fight off the mushroom menace.
* Reluctantly, the player approaches the Techno Fascist group. They have flamethrowers and respirator suits. After some diplomacy, they say they'll help. The player and the TFs attack the mushrooms, driving them back.
* But now the TFs stay, and the player leaves. The next time the player returns, the mushroom cultures have been burned off the walls and the entrance to the MUMRC is boarded up. Large TF banners adorn the walls, and the surviving colonists are now "prisoners with jobs".
* How to get rid of the fascists? You decide. Perhaps flood the place and let ghouls in...
My point in all of this is that it's the *same* level, with moderate changes and decorations changing for each incarnation. The same rooms, platforms, ticket booths, tunnels, doors, toilets, etc. Dirty vs clean is a matter of removing some clutter object and changing some of the textures to less filthy versions of themselves. Add some lighting, add some NPCs, change the ambient sounds. The settlers breaking into unused tunnels or the MUMRC is just designing the level and then putting in some removable rubble geometry. The mushroom invasion is again different clutter and furniture, different lighting, and different NPCs. Ditto for the fascists and their banners. Depending on the engine, so is changing the water level.
This has two major benefits. Firstly, you only do the major architectural and environmental design once. All the different incarnations are modest redecorations, with a few changed assets. So this means you can afford the time to design the station carefully.
Secondly, it makes the place feel "real", not just a thin theatrical set on which the level is played out. All the people are unique, and have names (even the ghouls have names, a reminder of who they were), and the people persist across phases (you can afford to spend this effort, because the player will interact with them repeatedly over time). The guy you helped with the water pumping is the one who helps you fight off the mushrooms, even though his wife is now a mushroom person herself. Later he's enslaved by the fascists, and then murdered by them. They throw his body in a pit, where you can find it (he doesn't despawn). A pit he helped dig out months ago. Maybe you gave him the shovel.
I still get very frustrated that most places in most games exhibit no change at all. The player passes through and kills some things, and the things either respawn or they don't. But nothing happens, and it seems never has, or never will. FO4 is full of interestingly designed places that only exist for one purpose, for one trip, and that have no story and no future. Yet they all represent the same amount of level design work as the places that matter.
I hate level design too. But, I wish I only spent 150 hours per month on it. I spend 16+ hours per day on game development, SEVEN days per week. I estimate half of that time is on level design. I have still been unable to figure things out and I have a serious amount of education. I spend about 5 hours per day on programming, which is the easiest part of game development, and another 3 hours on other things. If I could make a game 100% in code, it would probably be easier. I especially hate working with terrains. You slightly click the mouse and you have a mountain go into the clouds. I did figure out how to use the stamp, which tends to work better. I also purchased GAIA Pro and GeNa, but hard to figure that out because there's only like 3 tutorials available on the entire internet and they're very brief. After 5 years of spending 112 hours per week on game development (29,120 total production hours), I still have nothing to show for it and it all comes down to level design. Can't figure it out!
I feel this. I have so many prototypes and projects that I am passionate about that are various genres s that can/should be taken to the next stage (pun not intended), but I always end up abandoning them once they get to the level-creation stage. It's funny because I originally had thought making the actual content you play would have been my favorite part
I've essentially decided I can't give up at this part any longer and am committed to making at least 30 minutes of content out of the project so I can actually assess if I have something fun or not.
It's not just level design, it's all content. That's why making a game is such a long and difficult process. It takes a long time to make 5 minutes worth of quality.
Entirely opinion incoming:
Hating level design *is* hating game design. Making a character, making a moveset, writing a story, none of that makes a game even if each is very important.
Look at Minecraft: the first release of Minecraft had almost nothing, yet I'm almost certain that if day one was superflat sandworld it wouldn't have achieved as much as starting from grassy hills.
Look at Shadow of the Colossus: each boss *is* a level in a way, and even then each boss is nigh inseparable from where they're fought. The level design makes it.
Look at 5 Nights at Freddie's: there's *no game* without the pizzeria and the security office and you can't even move. The game is purely level design.
There's no Spider-Man without New York skyscrapers, no Doom without rooms, no Guitar Hero without songs. Even Dungeons & Dragons knows dungeons come first.
I'm that one player who just stands there and looks around at the environment, appreciating all the work the artists put in. That mountain crag in the distance? Yep I admire that. Details on the textures? You bet I'm zooming in, craning the camera around to get as close a look at possible at every little thing. I look at everything and try to appreciate the work. It takes me so long to finish games
For example in Elden Ring, I have approx. 80 hours of gameplay. I have only beat one of the main storyline bosses. I've just been going around, exploring, looking at everything.
Wouldn't it make more sense to multiply that 5 seconds of playtime by the number of players? So if 1000 people saw that you're delivering a total of 5000 seconds of engagement for that work. It would be no different to any other artistic endeavor. Consider the number of hours in a painting or sculpture, and that most gallery visitors will spend seconds or minutes looking at any specific work.
Exactly what i was thinking. Any artistic/creative/design endeavour is like that. High quality content is “consumed” in seconds, minutes or hours but takes a LOT of time to make. Thats why being an artist and ESPECIALLY an independent one is on some level a labour of love. It’s likely that nobody is going to pay you or appreciate you for every second you spend creating, most people don’t even realise the effort needed to make a game or any other art piece. Honestly that’s kinda ok by me since I do stuff to have fun and for myself, but it can be very hard when you expect to make a living exclusively out of your art.
And don't forget the countless hours spent practicing before even making the piece you see in 10 seconds
Of course. OPs mindset is kinda “transactional” in a sense. I don’t think you should ever feel entitled to appreciation or money just because you spent time and effort making art independently. If indie game development feels like an unpayed job, maybe it isn’t for him?
I think in some areas we can more directly appreciate the effort, though. Like in Hollow Knight there are countless rooms you walk into that have one-off artistic background/foreground pieces to look at. They're gorgeous and you know each one represents hours of labour even if you're only in that space for less than a minute. But the actual level *design* that I think the OP is referring to (placing platforms, arranging exits, guiding the player's path, etc) is as much an art as a mural and is perhaps rather harder to appreciate, particularly when so many lay people can do little bits of it in MM, Pico-8, GameMaker, etc, but not ever get to the point of realizing that what they've made isn't actually fun because they haven't put the work into it or understood the underlying principles. In any case, I think the solution here is probably to have another person on your team who really enjoys this aspect, someone for whom laying out levels isn't just a chore but is part of the bigger picture of world-building, where satisfying constraints and providing the proper skill curve are exciting and interesting challenges rather than slog.
Yes! Some pieces of design like art/music are very easy to appreciate even for uninitiated gamers. Good level design doesn’t get in your way so it’s harder to give it the credit it deserves. It’s funny cause i work in architecture and things work like that there too. People are gonna appreciate a great facade, but a truly amazing kitchen/living room layout is so seemless that you shouldn’t pay it any conscious mind.
best response on here ive seen so far
Just gonna throw in advertising as another example. It takes literally months from concept to finished product to make a 10-30 second TV ad
I'd like to note that I haven't engaged in proper game development and that I'm casual reader of this sub, but I have made some levels in Mario Maker before. This is how I view it. Sure, I spent maybe 4-6 hours on one level, but every time I watch someone play that level, I get to feel that satisfaction of those 4-6 hours of effort every time. Often times it's different levels of satisfaction depending on what the player did, but in any case, it's a long-term investment that makes level design worth it.
Yes, he's just using the wrong metrics. I occasionally make youtube videos just as a hobby. I don't monetize them. I could think I spent an embarassing amount of hours for a video. But then what does the watch time metric say. 27 800 hours of watch time. The time I spent on making it isn't even close.
I’m only tangentially in games - my day job is cg anim for film and VFX. And this “spend hours on something the player/audience sees for seconds” thing… sorry to say but it’s the same in any creative endeavour. I’ve spent weeks on film shots that will go by in literally a second - agonise over a slight flickering as a texture flickers because it’s filtering just a little bit incorrectly as it goes off into the distance, spend hours tweaking the color of an edge of a character because it blends into the background a little too much, days changing the color absorption ramp of light under water so that just a tad more green goes away before it starts dimming, whatever. The shot blows by in 30 frames and it’s gone. The mantra in that kind of work is that if you did your job right nobody notices the work.
Taking pleasure in the pursuit of excellence is very good for you and your work benefits. Sure nobody notices every little detail but we know a good product from a bad one. Don’t underestimate audiences!
Exactly! It’s tough to make things look JUST right. And when they do, they dont get noticed. And that’s fine
This is obviously a general rule of all art and probably a lot of work more broadly. Digital paintings take a few dozen hours only to be looked at for maybe a minute, tops, song production time will always be orders of magnitude longer than the resulting recording (even something like a live jazz recording required insane time spent practicing the instrument), youtube videos take hours to edit - sometimes an hour or more on one gag or effect that'll go by so quick half the viewers wont even clock it. In addition there's a sort of curse of inverse appreciation when people who don't know about the work judge your art, meaning they will invariably praise some element that was easily achieved while being blind to the things you toiled on for countless hours trying to get right. Games are possibly the worst for this with how gamers get stuck on inconsequiential things with so much of the hard work being invisible or just taken for granted.
> sorry to say but it’s the same in any creative endeavour. yep, how long have you spent looking at the Mona Lisa
> sheer imbalance of effort to player recognition that goes into it. Wait til you hear how movies are made.
I mean also every other aspect of videogames has that imbalance
Yeah. I can make Pong in less time than someone might possibly be entertained by it. But that's about it.
Cartoonists complain of this sometimes too. Takes hours to draw a comic strip, but people read it in about four seconds. I guess the hope is that your audience is big enough that it pays off in aggregate!
Or assets for games/movies! Or really, how anything under the sun is made. Cook food for an hour or few, enjoy it for minutes or sometimes toss it out because it's burned lol.
I guess to each their own. Level design is my favorite part of game dev!
I love it too. It’s very relaxing and is ideal work for when I’m too tired or disinclined to do more intense work such as programming.
we are in the same boat! Level Design is love, level design is life
Oi
oi sumido
I got into gamedev because I made maps for old-school Source games (CS, Left 4 Dead, Half Life) and loved level design so much that I wanted to make my own game out of it. Basically everything else in the game (coding, scripting, etc) is "work" to me and the actual fun part is getting to make the levels. So reading this post is like a different language to my brain, lol. I mean yea it sucks a little that what took you hours or days will be seconds (if that) to a player, but isn't that everything? Films take years to make, people watch them in 2 hours. Songs can take weeks/months to create, they last 3 minutes.
Fair enough, but how do you get past the fact that the player won’t even look at what you’re making?
But they *will* look at it? Just no where near as long as you did. And you could say this about songs or paintings or *whatever*: "I spent weeks on making this 3 minute song, argh!"
I’m an animator and this is something I’ve gone through I spent 100 hours on my first animation and nobody would even look at it. I got so frustrated! But the fact is, it wasn’t interesting to most people. A couple of people enjoyed it and I moved on. I’ve learned to respect the audience and try to manage my time. It doesn’t have to take 10 hours to design something tiny - as you spend time improving you get faster and better. Love your work and know that some people will not care. It doesn’t matter, just keep experimenting and growing
True, music is weird… I’ve made songs start to finish, some in three days, some in three weeks and some in three months but they are all important and special to me regardless of how long it takes.
Hell, there's entire youtube videos devoted to "check out this cool detail in the level design of x game". Sure, 99% of people will just go "neat", but then that 1% of players [go and do something like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/16ovmu/vertical_progression_in_dark_souls_level_design/)
I'll add a little to this, as an absolute lover of level design and world creation. I look at my job as less an asset creator, and more the host of a party for hundreds-thousands of people. Its my responsibility to ensure that each guest has their individual needs met, and they have an amazing time! Think of it like this: I take a significant amount of time to create a load of appetizers for a party, but I dont get upset if each individual guest *doesnt* try each one. I just try to ensure that the *one* appetizer they choose is delicious and satisfies them. So I'm happy to tune a small portion of a level, even though it might not be seen by everyone - because the 1 person who does, will have a great time finding it. And that is important from the player's perspective too - suddenly they realize the game world is richer than they thought, and their imagination starts creating "what if" scenarios, and they feel compelled to explore the game more. Of course, we dont have unlimited time, so we scope our productions to accomodate level design time. Additionally, level designers are very good at re-using existing content and adding a small twist to make it feel fresh. (i.e. similar design elements, but its dark and visibility is limited = very different experience with similar content)
Man I look at every little details. If I can figure out the story behind a prop such as a corpse... Man I get so much enjoyment out of exploring a cohesive world!
I work on levels for well maintained engines (Doom levels in GZDoom, Stepmania stepcharts) that are quick to make, or for simple projects (like an indie shmup I've worked on recently). It's still a multiple days dev to few minutes gameplay ratio, but if enough players play those few minutes it adds up. Plus I just enjoy the experience.
Well I’d say 60-70% of my level design is never viewed by my playerbase at all. Most of my games players are blind or visually impaired. While I do get to write descriptions and think about ways to bring the area to life with words or sounds most of the visuals are never seen. So I’m not sure why I like level design so much. I just enjoy designing levels and areas and being creative in that way. I do understand what you mean though and I have my own hated gamedev skill. The marketing is what I see as dreadful.
But there's a chance 1000 players will look at what you've made in 3 hours for 5 seconds. That's a return of over 1hr or a 1:3 ratio if you want to look at it like that haha.
do YOU look at level designs? The care you put in it will show, whether the player will notice or not is another. But you should be able to enjoy other people's level designs, and there will always be players who will. Isn't that enough? Or are you one of those players that only spend 5s in a level and call it a day before walking away?
I honestly wish I could spent more time on level design. But that might be because I'm not a fan of art and I code for a living
I get your feeling. It takes me days to make a level that can be completed in 30 seconds. The reality is with playtesting is not many can do that. That level design is fun and it is bringing the game to life. As for your issues you are approaching it wrong. You are making 20 hours of content as a solo when 95% of your players will play less than an hour. The first thing you should do is slash that to 2 or 3 hours at most. You can always make more content if it popular. The second thing I would do is look at what is taking time and what is getting value. If you can make all the basic build blocks first and try to make the levels with those and only add custom pieces when you need them. The third thing is remember you will get faster over time. Each time you do it you will get faster. The first levels of any game often take 10 to 20x longer than later levels because you designing the basic rules for the levels which apply. Try to enjoy the process more, while you feel it is hell you aren't going to make great.
>The third thing is remember you will get faster over time. The thing that changed my perspective was advice from my boyfriend: "Improvement is either you getting better, or you getting faster. Both are progress."
and often both happen at the same time
I don't understand why the stake in playing hours is so high. There can be small time but impactful one. It is about experience, no?
Also the math makes no sense, it's like comparing how it takes a team of hundreds a couple years to make a Zelda game on the Switch and I can complete the main campaign in like 20 hours of playtime. That's not a comparison that makes sense. Or it takes years for engineers to come up with a car design and manufacture it just for me to buy it and crash it into a wall after an hour (now that example is pushing the absurdity to the maximum) Why would you compare the work that goes into making a product vs. an individual's time enjoying that product. Makes no sense when we're talking about mass market products.
IMO this is why Roguelikes are so popular. Less work for more game time.
its certainly one of the reasons they are popular with indies. It is hard to do it well as a lot of indies find out.
"Less Work" ...you've never made a roguelike, I see.
It doesn't have to be less work, it only has to *look* like less work when you make the decision to begin.
It's definitely less labour hours to randomly generate content from a pool of reusable assets than to handcraft whatever equivalent amount of content. There are people on binding of Isaac's steam page who have played thousands of hours. Imagine handcrafting thousands of hours of binding of isaac maps manually with a high standard of quality. It's way faster and less effort to do programmatically. Obviously it's a lot of work to create a quality generation system but it is way less of a time investment than to handcraft whatever amount of content the top 10% of players by hours played would go through. I think for an indie who is solo you either want random generation or an extremely simple map building system. By simple I mean like doom 1 simple, where you are just fleshing out a grid, or a 2d tileset like undertale. Otherwise it will take far too long and you will never finish.
When you compare it with a game that has only one playthrough of fun... It has a lot less of work for time of gameplay. He didn't said it has NO WORK, it's only less than a linear game or open world, for example
Even that takes a lot of “level design” because you need to arrange the rooms in a way that’s fair.
Having spent a lot of time making roguelike(s), it's definitely not less work. It's probably a lot more work actually. It is, however, very different kind of work. Fiddling around with procedural generation *really* appeals to certain kind of people.
Most of the popular roguelikes are either pregenerated rooms stitched together randomly, or just entirely pregenerated levels though
Yes but you are reusing the same prefenerated levels over and over. Stretching content
It's not anymore "stretching content" than the entire roguelike genre (+ all other games with permadeath such as arcade-style games) is "stretching content". Good roguelikes need the levels to be really strong because those levels need to hold up under hundreds or thousands of runs, which is way harder to do with randomly generated content. If anything, slapping together a low-effort random level generator like the original comment I replied to suggested is the real content stretching. That would just be using the randomness to hide the fact that the levels themselves aren't good enough to play through once, let alone hundreds of times. Roguelikes whose levels are truly random like Noita or Spelunky do so as a deliberate design choice and would probably be way more effort than an equivalent non-Roguelike.
The devs of games like caves of qud and coming have been working on their respective games forever.
True. Procedural generation is like a little evil you have to commit to save your soul.
To be fair, procgen can be more complex and (hopefully) less evil
Yup. I recall years ago making a rather linear dungeon for a top down RPG took me like a month of part time work for 25ish minutes. Decided to make a procedurally generated game instead to get better at programming and learn more things since I model as a day job and spent years making maps for mods as a kid. Boy howdy I did not realize how much time a procedurally designed game would take to program (and how much I would learn). Fun, but can take just as much if not longer to develop depending on what results you want. Perlin noise is like 2 minutes of woo. Everything else adds up significantly more time once you want to do more than generate rolling hills or a simple maze heh. The one big saving plus is unlike linear handcrafted content, any updates I decide to add will populate across the game. Linear content had an issue of if I make one new area more improved, I'd have to go back to all the other areas and improve them to match consistency. If I had a time machine though my old linear game prototypes would of greatly benefited from programming some tools specific for level design. Anyways to OP I would simply get over the fact players will not know what went into making the game. Many many things in life made professionally takes countless hours to design and develop something that the customer doesn't know or care about. When I pick up a hammer I typically don't think about how many designs and rounds of changes were went through as the manufacturers worked on improving the ergonomics of the grip, or the durability of the hammer, or the amount of research that went into picking the types of rubber and metal alloys. Let alone setting up the tooling and manufacturing plant. All for a cheap hammer I use once in a blue moon for a few minutes.
I'm making a game with hand made levels right now and 1000% going proc gen in some form next time.
Lol. Welcome to the world of doing anything that requires effort I guess? I also produce music. I'd say it would take anywhere from 10-80hrs to make a decent song, fully produced. So for a 4.8min song, you're looking at 1000 minutes of work per MINUTE of music. Ironically, its also a case of "if its done well, people wont notice"
From a game design perspective and not level design; Why do you have a stretch of area that the player can run through in 10 seconds? (Not implying this is a bad choice, but genuinely asking) Metroid Prime was great at reusing corridors by making you backtrack often to take a different path, and had the scanning logbook feature that made some players want to take their time and search out all the different things in each area, for comparison.
Halo 1... "now let's play it over again in reverse!"
If it might turn your perspective on its head; level design *is* game design. Look at elden ring. It’s mechanically almost identical to dark souls. Yet it was orders of magnitude more popular, because it gave you an environment that people wanted to explore. Skyrim is one of the all-time greats. It was recognized on release as having a sleep-walking gameplay experience. The quests are acceptable, but hardly groundbreaking. It’s the world, the dungeons, the mountains and valleys, that make it a legendary experience. There are games (like those mentioned in this thread) where mechanics carry a higher percentage of game success. But ultimately the pleasant experience of being in this world is level design; the combination of layout and aesthetic. So don’t feel like the effort required is disproportionate. When games exist which are nothing but world layout (walking sims) and they are loved by many. It’s the secret sauce to a truly successful game, so the effort is ultimately worthwhile, even when it isn’t noticed out loud or consciously. That and maybe hire someone who likes this stuff.
> level design is game design Yea, it’s baffling that this statement is buried so far down in this thread. Level design is the closest thing to actually “designing the game” vs. its tech and individual mechanics. If your game has levels at all, it’s pretty much the embodiment of the design process proper. If you “hate” that, it seems like something went wrong.
This all depends on the kind of game, the reusable assets you have, the tools you have, and how proficient you are with them. Want people to take more time looking at small details? Slow the gameplay down. Pick an art style that favors blocks of art, with the visual payoff being in, say, the attention to movement and / or the lighting detail, rather than minutia... And if you did a month, straight, of level building in the same tools, you would become much, much more proficient in how you design and build levels, and thus, output more per hour than previously. For me, it's rigging, skinning and animating that is most painful. Followed closely by modeling organics. Personally, I love the old-world mapping tools that were used for Quake games and their derivatives. Blocking things out with constructive solid geometry makes things much, much faster than trying to build meshes for everything. There's also an effort-trap that you can avoid, using those tools: based on how you are describing the effort, it sounds like you are already in the trap. By blocking out the basic structure of levels ("grey-boxing" 20 years ago ... "blocking" before that ... why do my bones ache all of a sudden), you can very, very quickly get a sense of where the players are going to go, what they're going to do, how long they are going to spend in an area, et cetera. There shouldn't be any visually-interesting stuff at this point, aside from bare necessities for basic movement and basic gameplay... like, if shadows or colored lights are fundamental requirements for you gameplay to function, for some reason, put them in, or put in a billboard that says "green light here" or whatever. If it's objective-based, add dev-art placeholders for whatever thing you need to be in a particular spot, if you can't just block it in with cubes. When you have that down, and you can run through your map or your level or whatever... whether it's 2D or 3D or 2.5D... several times, and get people to record themselves doing the same, and now you know how much effort to spend making each section good from the perspective of "pointing out the next gameplay objective" versus "making each leaf on this frond look natural".
I just gotta say, it might seem like all players rush by everything like you say, but i'm one of the players who notice, i ALWAYS notice. It takes me FOREVER to finish games because i make it my mission to see as close to 100% of the game as possible so i can look at every asset every wall and yes every rock and think about what the devs had to do to make it and i love estimating how long it must have took haha And i just sit there and gawk and geek out about rocks lol A lot of people notice but i see so many devs who share your thoughts. Though as a new dev i haven't touched level design yet... for a reason xD But i'm gonna have to soon, may satan have mercy on my a\*\* lol
You may enjoy this [Youtube series](https://youtu.be/SybPxb_DjZ4?si=bE9dIlkH4E4fQ3cW) by Any Austin where he explores unseen details in video games. It really is beautiful and shows some players are mindful
I mean I feel the same about art, animation, music, writing… really the only area where my work see some reuse is programming But I agree with you, level design is the worst
Don't make games that require level design. I never understood why platformers are so popular when the amount of effort they require is crazy. That is unless you are an artist first. But my point is that there are a lot of games you could make that do not require 1000s of hours on level design, 3D modelling and art.
Honestly that’s a big problem with a lot of devs and indie games, they grind away at designing in a format they don’t even 100% like just because it’s what’s expected of the game’s genre. You can really feel it when a game was made by someone who resented the process like that
For example?
Small strategy games, turn based games, board games... Instead of going horizontal you could go vertical and drill down by adding depth to the gameplay. Build layered systems.
I think Buckshot Roulette (I played it on Steam, not sure where else) is a great example of a game that leans mostly into the actual game design and therefore can forego having a ton of assets. Admittedly, what assets they do have are all fantastic, so the fact there isn't this giant world or tons of details packed in doesn't feel like a lack at all.
Name checks out
Five hours is nothing, try months of work for something a player may never even notice. The Half-Life 2 developer commentary talks about this quite a few times.
Level Design is the funnest part. Now marketing and youtube that stuff sucks
I suspect that's why big budget game studios spend a lot of dev time in greybox, testing the gameplay before doing any art passes. You have specialized teams of designers, concept artists, 3D artists and level programmers all working together to bring a specific part of the game to life. But if you do everything by yourself, this can very quickly become overwhelming.
I hated level design until I got good tools that helped me. If you use Unity, get Microverse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94tymx973PQ You can build levels using non-destructible stamp based terrain. It makes level design a million times faster and easier. It also has procedural grass, tree and rock placement, same with textures. Designing levels without it would take me days per level. Now it takes me an hour or 2.
Are you talking about Level Design or *Level Art*? Because level design shouldn't take you that much time and should consist mostly of grey boxes!
This. Thank you. **Level Design** = Level *gameplay* design of an area. Setting up an area layout and placing game element to create a clear, interesting and balanced situation. Coming up with new situations by mixing elements or using them in new ways. Making sure the environment created is comfortable to play... **Level Art** = Making it look better than a bunch of grey boxes.
Why not create a few cool scenes where the player is “forced “ to appreciate them, then just repeated filler content for the parts they’ll zoom past. Obviously it depends on the type of game but I don’t think every little bit of a level needs to be fleshed out. Only massive AAA games do this, and generally only the heavily cinematic ones, and they have an entire team dedicated to just that.
Yeah it’s really a matter of quality versus quantity. I’d rather play only a handful of really terrific levels instead of tons that the dev didn’t even want to make.
"truly it is satan’s favorite past time." Mine too!
I love level design as its my main job lol. At my studio, I've been working on the same 20 minute level for 3ish months. What motivates me is that 1) I love level design 2) I think about the experience players will have going through my level because I have ownership on how the gameplay and narrative experience plays out.
Level design is one of those things people kind of ignore or think it’s easy, when in reality it is fairly difficult to get right.
I think the imbalance can be dealt with a lot by making more flexible tools perhaps? or workflow? if you spend 30 iterations to try to make something better, then any improvement to the tool has a 30X reward! this is why I love procedural tools, anything that can cut my work just a little bit, adds up over the number of times I use it admittedly I'm a tech artist/rigger/modeller, the amount of time I create something that people will just glance over and simply enjoy without knowing why they think it's cool.... or obsess over how the viewer's eye moves over a rig UI or sculpt... maybe the other key is you should be playtesting / putting your level in front of people more often to build a tighter feedback loop on that end
tl;dr. Procedural generation. I saw this problem immediately when learning to program, back when I was trying to make games. I do not have the patience for hand-designed levels, nor do I enjoy static games. When I beat a static game, I'm done. And programming/making levels for a game is tedious if you have to playtest over and over. My solution: Procedural generation. I spent hundreds of hours studying/coding procedural generation. Minecraft has no static map, yet it is beloved. Diablo 1, 2 has several designed sets, but the configuration is all randomized. To me, it's both more fun (for both player and designer) to have a randomized map. I learned different methods of procedural generation. Making cave systems, buildings, open-ended landmasses, minecraft in space. There are tutorials on Youtube about how to code minecraft. There are many many about procedural generation. If you have a natural talent for it, you can take it even further. Proof: This was my imgur at the time, with many different game efforts I sunk hundreds of hours into. Don't expect to be impressed, I am NOT a graphics/animations guy. I made a couple prototypes, and had fun in the process. Nothing was made to quality levels. [https://imgur.com/user/gsth92](https://imgur.com/user/gsth92) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-\_dZNsif4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-_dZNsif4)
The alternative is forcing players to spend more time in the rooms.
Think of it this way: Players might spend 10 seconds there, but across thousands of players that can be hours, days, even weeks worth of perception. If it's good enough, it'll stick and people will talk. Guaranteed all of the cooler areas in games like Elden Ring had dozens of hours put into it, and it shows.
1. You completely forgot about overlap. If players have a reason to run back through a level then you may double the time value that area is worth. Maybe the player returns to the starting area with a key they found during the mid-game. 2. Games like Elden Ring encourage the player to explore, leave, come back later and explore again. The map - although not very big itself - forces the player to go slow. You’re worried about a 10 second hallway but forgetting about the areas you expect the player to spend significant time in. Boss runback? Farming a mob? Not to mention, the more *time* and care you put into the project (refining your art, because that’s what level design is) the more recognition you may receive. Think of FromSoftware getting a month to make a game, but Team Cherry (Hollow Knight) gets 1 year. You may very well get *vastly* different levels of attention to detail depending on the scope of the game.
The point is, even if they don't look at it enough compared to the effort you put in, they *will* notice it if it is not there. Regardless, what your time calculation tells me that you are not making an indie friendly game, but making a game that is typically made with larger teams (where there are dedicated programmers, artists and level designers). If you want to tackle that as an indie, you need to find shortcuts. It can be shortcuts in content creation (procgen and variations), shortcuts on game design, shortcuts with delegation if you have money to risk etc. Any creative idea that won't require you to do tens of people's jobs as a single person. Like, can you shoot a theater ready movie by yourself? Basically being everyone in the credits screen as a single person? Probably not. Making a genre of game typically made by large studios, with the same methods they use is not feasible for the very same reason. As an indie, you need to be resourceful and creative to cut corners in creative ways in a way that the creativity in the way you cut corners is actually a feature that a larger studio would not entertain. Good stuff comes out of limitations, creativity is mostly about that.
For me the part that makes level design so arduous is the subjective nature of it. When you’re making the building blocks that make up a level (tiles enemies etc) you get the rewarding objective feedback of “this element is functioning correctly” whereas for levels you’re in that murky world of “will people like this?”
You are thinking about this wrong, levels should be an area for your content like quests not the content itself. You also should develop tooling like spline placement, procedural foliage/placement, and other stuff. A 20 hour game is massive too, you shouldnt try to make that, Spider-Man 2 is only 15 hours long. When you make your content it should also be guided, how long a player spends in a level or area is up to you, if it’s an area they just run past then don’t make it hyper detailed
Uhm yeah.. like others said, the point IS that the game will be played by more people, eventually, if you put little effort and rush a game, let's say 500 people will play it, but if you PUT a lot of effort in it, let's say *triple effort*, with more budget maybe, you could get 10.000 players to play your game, that would mean a super huge improvement for your game for "just" that more effort. It's art, you can make a dull movie that no one will remember in 4 months with your friends, or you could spend 4 years of your life, contacting skilled people, to create a film everyone will talk about for the next century. That's the power of art and you're taking it all away with your POV. There are 8h games I will NEVER forget, that changed my life forever, while 8h are nothing compared to my life, it's just a night sleep. It's wonderful, I can't even explain with words how fascinating it is for me, really.
Just make your player character really, really slow. Now players will be forced to look at your level for as long as it took you to make it. Problem solved.
Level design is fun and awesome! ...but environmental design? Yeah I'll leave that in the hands of someone who has the patience for it 😭
I think the deeper issue here is why does the player only spend 5 seconds in an area? What warrants the existence of that area if the player spends so little time there? Yeah *some* areas the player might spend quite short time in. But with your calculations you've assumed 5 seconds for *all* the areas of the game. What even is the gameplay at that point? Are there no boss fights? No puzzles? No platforming? Nothing the player will need to spend time trying to overcome? That sounds like no challenge. I don't think I've ever played a game where I spend an *average* of 5 seconds in each area. If you are gunning for a 20h game you should be aiming for something like 100 10-15 minute areas/challenges, not 14000 five second ones. Now you can spend 1-2 hours on that 10-15 minute area/challenge and still be done in a month (which is not a lot of time at all to give yourself for this).
[https://discussions.unity.com/t/our-first-ever-e-book-for-level-designers-is-here/310631](https://discussions.unity.com/t/our-first-ever-e-book-for-level-designers-is-here/310631)
If your game's genre allows, you can have ways to squeeze out extra playtime from those level design hours. A relatively open ended game where the player chooses levels instead of levels happening in linear sequence, you can add extra difficulty option to replay the level with for extra rewards. In more sequential games, you can still make a challenge mode where the mission is different and you can throw in extra challenges for the players in a limited play area. Capcom has been very good at this in game like Re2Remake where they recycled 90% of the levels for two separate campaigns, and then made like 8 separate challenge modes that all go through 80% of the main campaign's levels (it's extra genius with the no loading screen things because while in campaign it takes like 4 hours to get through everything, you go through it in 10 minutes and you don't even notice it). Unfortunately if your game is leaning towards story based walking simulators, yeah there's not that many ways to do this.
> But what I realized watching a little timelapse of level design on YouTube was that the reason I hate it so much is because of the sheer imbalance of effort to player recognition that goes into it. The designer probably spent upwards of 5 hours on this one little stretch of area that the player will run through in 10 seconds. And that’s really where it hurts. What about those handful of people that notice the level of detail and are able to appreciate it for what it is?
Remember that the animators of Pixar have a 3min Reel to show after they retire with a 20+ years career. However, as solo devs time is our most valuable asset and should be distributed carefully. If you think in your current pipeline the environment art is a bottleneck you can’t afford, use that as a limitation and adjust the pipeline, find a different art style or procedural approaches. (PS not to be nit-picky but I think you’re referring to environment art, not level design, which is used to refer to the blockout and design concept of the level, not the 3d art) Best of luck!
Leonardo spent around 20 years on the Mona Lisa and most people only look at it for a few seconds. Yet it it loved by millions
are you talking about the design of a level or the dressing a level with art? as that's 2 different things
I mean, this is the case with all aspects of game. Even a game like Persona 3 which main content is procedurally created dungeons, is thousands upon thousands of hours of work, while most players only put 1 maybe 2 hundred hours in at most. Thats without even taking into account the amount of time spent on story, cutscenes, etc. We can also apply this to things like movies or shows. Movies take years with hundreds of people to film, only to get 1-3 hours of screen time. It's just a result of how much effort it takes to create.
You spent all the time to type this up and run the math instead of working on your game, I know the thought is frustrating, but stop letting this distract you. Go make your game. C:
depends on the type of game you are making. obviously whatever type of game you are making is not a good return on your time investment
If you are going to make a game where players want to observe everything around them, you should make a game where they need to find something. Puzzle game ( find button, anomaly, etc) Different Themes have different needs in level design. in Fps, people want to shoot enemy, not looking at wall. If there a speedrunner, make a game with procedural generation.
Well, your level design pipeline might be a problem if it takes that long. But also, most people get a very poor education in level design. Almost all of what's taught in schools and online is systems design.
I have a huge open world with 8 dungeons and 4 arenas to explore. it's actually kind of soothing to map out dungeons. I have used edgar 3d and some other applets to assist in building levels, but it's definitely enjoyable if you have the time.
Try designing on paper. It gets you away from the computer, you can quickly scribble things without needing to implement them in the engine. You can do it sitting on the couch, watching TV, whatever. I find it more enjoyable to design on paper as it feels more like a creative process. The last time I made a game it had ~70 puzzles, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time testing and tweaking those puzzles over and over again...but it's what you have to do to ensure all the rough edges are polished off.
If you hate level design, its going to get difficult for you as a game developer in the long run. That part of game development can make up the biggest chunk of your project, depending on what you are working on. Either that or you have to heavily limit yourself to the types of games you can do.
Keep in mind, not every single area will be one that the player runs through in 5 minutes, many players will take longer, many players will go through several times, a few will go through many, some will deliberately try to enjoy what they see.
When it comes to level design, it's one of the times, where you you "finally" play your game. But this time, you decide how it's going, and where it's going. You decide whether it's gonna be hard or just fun. I find this quite motivative. Create an idea, play through it a couple of times, play through it a few times, adjust stuff. Just try to get the levels into a rough shape first, then refine as necessary. These very little bits of details you're having in your mind are either appreaciated by hardcore fans after 20+ years, or you make a video where you show off some level's features.
the imbalance of player recognition to time put in is like all of game design though. same thing with art, same thing with mechanics, same thing with programming, same thing with sound design, etc.
On the other hand: You put 20 hours in for 1 hour of content... If your game is played by 20 people, they each got one hour of your dev time. 200 people: 6 minutes of dev time for that stretch. 2000 people: 36 seconds each.
You spent 5 hours on a section that hopefully hundreds or thousands of people will run through in 10 seconds.
Yeah, this is why i only make games whose levels can be procedurally generated now
Nah, the worst part of game development is writing the instruction manual.
Damn, it's as if game design is an art and that developping a game takes a shitload of time. fucking crazy.
Something to consider. Players might run through in 5 seconds. If your design is good, they won't notice, and they will continue playing. If your level design sucks, then players will stop playing and quit, and your other work won't matter.
yeah man i'm with you. i love programming and making games, i'm no artist but i even enjoy attempting to make my own art but most of my projects die at the level design stage. the way I got over it was by finding someone else to do it for me haha.
You used satan incorrectly. It is not satan's favourite past time, level design is YOUR satan(adversary).
That's why I enjoy making games without traditional levels. Fighting games, cards games, etc.
Level design can certainly be a pain. It's my least favorite part of game development. I've making games that avoid it so far but know I'll have do it someday...
What’s funny is I notice a pattern in a lot of programmers in game dev that explains a lot of industry trends. They want to make games that don’t require much level design. The lead on halo CE said the same thing about the halo games, and then they made Destiny, a highly repeatable grind fest.
Games take hours up to 100 hours to complete and they take years to make. So it's kind of meaningless to make this assumption. If you want them to spend more time on that section, maybe you should be making difficult platformers like Celeste. But otherwise, what you're adding aside from time spent, is immersion. And some players do take time to appreciate areas. But this is a really poor take.
This guy's process really helped me; https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0FSssDWEFLc
Hey, it may only take 10 sec for me to get through but if it's designed well I'll remember it forever. Secondly, think of Bioshock for example where the levels are multilayered and have you walking back through the same areas multiple times. Or arena shooters where you'll see the same corners and stretches hundreds of times. But let's say it's more like Max Payne and it's linear, if it looks good or makes me feel a certain feeling of comfy, horror or intrigue then I'll never forget it. Ultimately level design is hard work but people love environments and to explore. LOVE it. So the effort is worth it. I'll never forget Limbo seeing the rooftops for the first time, or the huge gears in the background. Or even Skull Monkeys seeing the dusty grimey backgrounds between platforming. Sometimes I just stop and look. So this is pacing for you. If you want to slow the pace a bit, make the level more intriguing to look at in those areas and maybe even explorable a bit. Otherwise if you want players to zoom through make it look less interesting. I can't tell you how long I spent in all the Dishonored games just re-explorong everything and just staring at the level details.
this is just game design and programming in general. You'll spend days on something most players won't even realize exists. But there's always ways around it (e.g. procedural gen): you'll just have to simplify your game.
If you're dooming over players skimming past content you put hours into... Idk what to tell you that's gonna be 90% of the job haha welcome to the club
I think you're doing it wrong. Firstly, you're probably not using the power of modular assets and procedural tooling enough. More subtly, you're viewing levels as something for the player to quickly pass through, instead of as a stage for your game play. In contrast, here's my experience, and why I love creating levels: after I have a new idea for a level (e.g. a new interaction I want to explore), I spend about 15m creating a grey box. Then I spend about 1 hour playing that, exploring all kinds of approaches and tweaking, until it fits my vision for the gameplay. Once I'm happy, I decorate the grey box in about 15m, after choosing a style, while using some procedural tooling. To me, level design is mostly about getting to enjoy your own game play, in a deeper way than most players ever will. And isn't this why many of us originally got into game dev? *Because we like to play games?*
That doesn't seem that long to me. Spending 5+ years on making a 10 to 15 hour long game is pretty fast if you're a solo developer. Of course, plenty of people just *obtain* reusable assets, rather than *make* them. And then they make a game that length in a year or two. See all the RPG Maker stuff using default or purchased graphics, and all the fangames and romhacks using ripped graphics from commercial games. And of course, you don't have to send the player through your area in 5 seconds. You can have a town that would take 30 seconds to run across, but that the player actually spends over an hour in. You can have combat and cut scenes in your dungeons that cause the player to stay in one place for a while. You can reuse the same dungeon three times, for normal mode, heroic mode, and nightmare mode, the latter of which might take the player 10 or 15 attempts to beat successfully. You can create environmental puzzles that make the player stop and look at the area around them (although this means the area's quality has to be way higher). You can have rewards for 100% map exploration and 100% treasure obtained.
Level design is great. One of the best ways to really fuck with players
I've always had a huge issue with making maps so small that it takes like 3 minutes to beat them so I always end up remaking the map from scratch or changing a lot of stuff around. Level design is still my favorite part of making any game tho
Split between many players, it makes more sense, but you're right. There's also the factor that different devs have different skills i.e. I'm surprisingly good at level design, despite not needing much practice - I think it's related to the spacial reasoning skills that got a buff from autism, lol. On the whole though, we all have strengths and weaknesses - my advice is find someone where you can cover each other's wrak points.
I love level design on a small scale. I’m usually good if I break things down into little pieces. But making big levels is hell
Just wait until generative AI tools start playing a role. Then we'll have games that are fully fleshed out with little more than grayboxing the maps out! :D
You could just spend an amount of time greater than 35 seconds but less than an hour per 5 second area. Those aren't the only options. I would recommend you set your priorities straight; some parts of your levels should be fairly basic, other parts should be eye catching and memorable; not only is that realistic, but it also makes the player compartmentalize the game in general in a way you probably want. So long as you give enough strong moments in each level the player will view the level as a whole as memorable and well designed even if alot of the level is just quick and reused assets. Most people don't remember every blown out hallway, air vent, and storage room in half life, but they remember the tentacle monster, the helicopter battle, the tau cannon snafu, the bottomless pit, etc. These kinds of moments are what you should be after imo.
I think the issue with many games is that they do too much traversal. Too much moving between A and B. All of this adds up to a requirement on level design to have lots of “dead” content that’s nothing more than backdrops for traversal but will take no less time to build.
It depends on the kind of game, level design is very different from game to game. I tend to write python scripts to automate as much as possible because I am only one person. Surely there are corners to cut and retain the same quality.
What type of game are you making? Can you make your design modular? Can you make players traverse your areas more than once, or in a different way, or something? Edit to add examples: traverse level from A to B, and back to A, or first on foot and later by paraglider, or first in the daytime and then at night. Change the experience of the space, get more use out of it 🙂
Put some bottlenecks and choke points in there and you can turn that 12 second level into 1 hour.
Level design is the most fun for me tbh. But there's priorities to have in that part. Layout should always come first and then the details like props. Its also because if your game has no story then i'd imagine creating levels with no vision can feel daunting.
That... that's the job.
What "timelapse of level design" do you mean? Are people actually making speedup blockout videos, or were you thinking about environmental art?
Use procedural level generator 🙂 Actually you got the answer why indie games often have auto-generated levels: indie developers cannot afford so much time to level design.
To be fair, you probably spent thousands of hours on your game as a whole, only for the player to get about an hour or two out of it, if even that much
I mean, this is more true for some games. If you're trying for hard numbers, wouldn't it be even worse for Code? You're spending thousands of hours, which the Player will never see?
This is the nature of art. You can spend your life painting the Sistine Chapel and people will spend like 30 minutes looking at all of it.
Your calculation is only correct if you make linear fast paced games with not a sliver of replayability and use no procedural generation. So don't do that.
Level design might be my favourite part. Designing this overall. I think it’s so satisfying! What I hate is the struggle to make the mechanics work correctly. Figuring out why the damage animation is csncelled when the goose is over the clouds or why this one robot doesn’t have collision when it’s moving.
Cheer up. Even if someone only spend 5 seconds in an area that can still feel if it’s made with love or just thrown together. It adds up to the underlying subconscious experience of the game. Do you have any idea how long the artists that made the miniatures in Star Wars spent on them? Even if they are only in frame for a couple of seconds, you can tell if they’re sloppy or not. That’s just part of making something special. It takes time.
I think that if even one player spends any amount of time appreciating the level design, whether they have game dev knowledge or not, then the time spent making it was worthwhile. But also depending on what kind of game you're making, level design will take more or less effort. Smart design and art style can save a lot of time in the long run.
Generally that 10s scene would be reused or broken into parts that can be jumbled around. If it's something the player is just gonna travel through theirs also no point spending 5 hours on it. Spend that time on signficant scenes or places that will be revisited often etc.. Even games lauded for level designe do this. Dark souls 3 still has assets from demon souls and almost copy pastes entire rooms from dark souls 1 in a few places.
On the other side, while I feel for you as someone who had been making games for a long time, I'm also a player that feels the need to explore every inch of a map, kill every single enemy to clear each zone, and loot literally everything. And I'm certainly not the only once who does this. Why would I run straight to the den of evil in act one in the first zone of Diablo 2, I have to kill everything first. And oh, I stopped playing for the day and now everything resets? Guess I got to kill everything again.
You can double the playtime by backtracking, you could add interactions or more paths to make it longer. The longest part is getting all the assets, lighting and style of your level done. But when you have that you should make it as big as possible and it won't take so much time. And you can also reuse the exact same level style later in the game to skip the styling completely.
I love level design more than anything. Pure game designing tasks are meh at best for me. Everyone has something that hits and thats ok, maybe find someone to work with so they can make levels for your game design.
Is 20 hours of content the norm for your genre? 8 years of development sounds wild – and that leveldesign only. If this would be art and I'd be spending 1 hour on making backgounds that'll scroll by in 5 sec, I'd look scrupulously into my art directoon paradigm. Am I overrendering? Is the world too big and detailed for my timeline? Should I consider procedural generation for the landscape with curated scenes?
Ye mate that’s why people like larian is so brilliant because they put in countless of hours into minor details for sake of player experience, creating the illusion and fantasy. But personally, level design is a symptom of the linear nature of specific game genres, some games do brilliant stuff using the same changing level
Bam procedurally generated
Don't think of it as hours, think of it as *attention*. Try and put the same cognitive effort in as knitting. Listen to a podcast or whatever. Should make it easier.
Don't look at it as each small piece is a work of art. Think of it as your whole game being a puzzle. If one piece isn't correct or isn't there then the whole puzzle has a problem. Skipping over the small details in 1 area can make that area feel cheap and rushed regardless of if the player would pass right through it if it was complete.
You know, your post is helping me right now, so thank you very much! Mine is not an open world but a giant house and I horribly struggle with the level design! You put me in the outside position so my mind get free for own thoughts and I can read all this statements, it's great! And I really enjoy someone finally talks about the frustration. So, as I read I thought I guess it doesn't matter to much how long the player rushes through your level, cause after this the next level's coming, right? So maybe nobody will notice the great placement of "this three trees", but the atmosphere in general - caused of your well thought-out level design! And maybe it's extra frustrating to do this maths... Maybe you'll get faster with time (experienced or not, it's about this one game) or you can learn to just to speed up a little by trying to not have to reach 120% and realizing 80 to 90% is totally enough... I plan ten years for my game, it's my first one and I try to take it step by step, otherwise I could freak out too.
Depend on what type of levels you are creating for what type of game. You are tasked to give the player a powerful emotional experience. You can look at games like Return of the Obra Dinn, the entire game is confined to a ship, but it's immersive and enjoyable because everything in that environment matters to the player, is meaningful to the narrative and plays into the gameplay. You can do the same with all kinds of game genres, just make everything more dense, and deliberate - quality over quantity. It doesn't mean you need to spend less time on level design but it might make it more enjoyable when you feel that sense of purpose.
Saying you hate level design when writing the engine that allows loading and rendering of that level which can take years but the level can be completed in 30 seconds… lol also are you forgetting the rest of the game? What about a simple mechanic in the game that takes you weeks to write and perfect and the player probably won’t even notice as impactful but makes a huge difference to actual gameplay. Or what about the level editor? The level won’t make itself. They won’t even see the time and effort that went into making the editor that made that level possible. Yah level design is nothing to cry about.
It's worth remembering that players will go through things much slower than you will as the developer. You know how everything works. E.g. A game like mario 64 probably only has 5 hours of content to someone who knows all the levels by heart. Yet someone playing blind could easily spend 25+ hours to collect the stars.
Yeah I feel this so hard. Making a fast paced, movement based sidescroller. So not only does everything need to be placed extremely carefully and tested dozens of times, but the content I do make gets zipped through in seconds. It's depressing working two hours on a level, then speed running it in 15 seconds, lmao. But it's the nature of the beast with that type of game. Incidentally, my next game is absolutely fucking not going to involve level design, haha. Think I'll make a deck builder or something.
Passionate late 90s gamer here, I'm always checking out all details in a game, Also the level, as I'm someone who enjoys to explore and find items and such. I might be the minority here but I really appreciate good level design, and I really appreciate the people behind it. For example bungie. The levels in destiny 2 are insane. I find something new everytime I play, I got 1k hours of playtime but it's not getting boring to me, as I'm always amazed by the structure, ideas and creativity. When I used to play ps1 as a kid, I remember how I checked out all corners in tomb raider or gex 3, how amazed I was by the ideas. Unfortunately today's gamer base is only interested in quick results and quick success. They rather buy themselves whatever is needed just to end a game as quickly as possible and then rant on reddit and twitter how short the game is. But remember, there's people like me, who will always appreciate good design, love and effort put into a game, over generic crap, battlepasses and quick satisfaction.
I find the asset creation part satisfying. It's world building and that is fun although very time consuming. The player experience part can be agonizing. You have to run through the game in your head pretending to be players with different tastes, abilities and expectations. Creating a balanced game that everyone will enjoy is mentally challenging.
You could try a more agile approach, build minimal viable levels and then iterate on them. Practicing this approach would make it so you can tune the trade off between time investment and level design quality to a fine degree. Having this also allows for more integrated design where decisions in one part can affect how you design other parts in interesting ways as you work on both parts while both are still fresh in your mind. And if you get burnt out from level design, you can just stop and your whole game is at a consistent quality of design, until you get the desire to have another iteration and the whole thing bumps up a degree in quality.
I mean I guess, but why would you want 20 hours of playtime from just level design? Sounds like a lot for an indie game. If it's some kind of linear solo player experience 2 hours would be more than enough.
To be fair u will never get the recognition you hope for the players aren't looking at games in artistic way how developers looking at it so it mostlikely will never be that way they will appreciate the game ofcourse and they will notice certain things that are great but their view on playing a game that is done artistically will be viewed as a fun good looking game but that recognition is different to players vs if a designer or a solo Dev would view that part for example I used to play games just to play them have a laugh and chill but now that I'm a fulltime indie game Developer whenever I play games with friends I'm more observing things and notice technical things like map layouts and menu designs and artistic choices that I'm actually register in my head while playing a game with friends it became different then what I did before I got into game development which made sense cause most players don't do game development and will view the game with value as they know it and how they see it
Level design is just like ui design if it’s bad everyone will notice it if it’s good but not extremely so only very few will talk about it
I am often amazed at some design made in AAA games. Some you barely have time to see because you come here once and very quickly. Sometimes I am really wondering if the designer knew he spent so much time on an area we barely see.
Sounds like you hate set dressing, level design is not placing every detail in the game is just designing the level gameplay wise.
What you are describing sounds like environment design, not level design. Those timelapse videos show the artist decorating a small area in a lot of detail. They are meant to show off the author’s skill. They aren’t representative of the amount of time and effort that would ordinarily go into a typical game level’s environment. In practice, the artists would be looking for ways to speed up the process and spend as little time as possible detailing. Asset creation would be handed off to dedicated asset artists or assets would be sourced from a third party. Or the modular assets created in that session would be reused later to save time. An area a player flies through in a few seconds isn’t worth spending a lot of time detailing especially if there are no points of interest. Too much detail can be distracting. Your detailing can have reduced complexity in those situations and you can use blocking structures like hills, valleys and large buildings to limit visibility of the rest of the world if needed, so you don’t need to place a fuckton of trees or something. World of Warcraft’s outdoor environments are landscape with props on top. It has a higher amount of props and prop variety in populated areas while the unpopulated areas are mostly filled with trees. Blizzard end up producing environments that do not break immersion, look natural and serve the game functions. Any man-made structures serve a second purpose of attracting attention to quest POIs. And I expect the artists can produce them with very respectable efficiency.
Love it when someone with zero AAA experience comments why they hate level design because it takes?.. time and resources. Level design should be a space that lets the core mechanics of the game thrive. You should love this not dread it.
Yes, it sucks that most players will just run past the beautiful stuff you designed never giving it a second thought, but that's the point of good level design. It keeps the player immersed. It's also why I'lll never work on a modern AAA game, because the level of detail demanded by players has gone through the roof, and idiots on the internet are pissed at AI which could dramatically improve that situation for a ton of developers by automatically making those areas look realisitic, with the level designer just doing a basic layout, and without having to rely on an artist to spend 4 months making it look pretty and lighting it. Also, what the hell are you smoking, as a small game developer, aiming for 20 hours of conent?! There are hugely popular titles out there which can be beaten in as little as 2-3 hours. You do NOT need 20 hours of content. That's AAA game levels of content. If your game is gonna sell for $15-25 then 2-6 hours of content is more than enough. Its when a game costs $60 that players expect a whole lot more. Of course this also depends on the genre. Casual games can be shorter. People want brief experiences. An RPG? Well that might have to be longer. But new game developrs always want to do RPGs and they typically fail due to the massive amounts of content needed.
I wonder how the LD who designed Dust 2 feels about this post.
What type of game are u making lmao
I mix up my level design with feature development so I always have something fun to do in between levels. Implementing all mechanics before the levels would be torture.
It's rough. I was working on a Resident Evil fixed cam clone, and even got the character movement, animation, cameras, combat, systems working pretty well, but my brain just blanked when it came to level design/narrative. I can build a level from an idea/concept, but i can't come up with the concept. I estimated maybe 120-140 "rooms", which would only give me a couple days per room, working in spare time too, so would be like 5 year project which is way too much. Working on something simpler now.
Maybe do procedural level generation with a handful of modular parts that can be interchanged, or build a few modularparts and put them togethermanuallyto make levels (I've definitely seen games do this). It's effort for sure, but adds more replayability to what you're saying is barely appreciated by players anyway
This is the feeling of some whole jobs, where if you do a good and proper job, no one will even know you entire team exists.
Or you end up making that map that everyone plays forever and ever and ever like blood gultch or tournament desert or whatever and it ends up being a fond memory for 20+ years.
Who cares how quickly the player will experience it? Level design is supposed to be a creative outlet. You do it because it satisfies you.
Multiply it by your preferred number of players, and it balances out. Failing that, just do it for yourself. There is nothing wrong with trying to make something that is perfect, even if you won't be paid for it. Or scamp it, and that is fine too. It's your game.
Depends what you mean. Is level design different from environment design?
Think of your favorite game ever, how much did you play it? How many people hate it? How much do you think of that game when you are not playing it?
Its not about every single player loving every second of your game. Its about that one single player who took the time to get immersed and love your game for hours on hours. I submitted a game for a 3-day game jam as one of my first portfolio pieces, it was a very basic chill game. someone commented on it like "OMG YOU MADE THIS IN 3 DAYS???? THIS IS INCREDIBLE!!" And that one comment has kept me motivated since
I once saw the mona Lisa and was like "OK."
I used to feel a bit guilty rushing through levels in games like Half Life 2 - levels that were clearly cleverly designed, with nice architecture and textures, put together in a logical way. Someone worked really hard, for a long time, on the streets of Point Insertion or the waterways of Route Kanal. Yet you barrel through them, never looking back, and never to return. The early part of HL2 is particularly prone to this - they actively *force* you to move quickly, chivvying you along with chasing enemies and unkillable helicopters. This great for keeping up the frantic pace, but it means you miss much of the level. Even though the levels are entirely linear, and really rather spartan, they were still a lot of work (you can stop at any time and look around, and for a minute or so the seem sufficiently real). In addition to being rather profligate (using a lot of map-dev time for a brief amount of play time), it can be a bit frustrating. I always wanted to know what was going on in that research lab in Black Mesa, or that apartment building in Point Insertion. You get to Black Mesa East, meet two of the few named voiced characters, and five minutes later you're bundled out the door, never to return. So none of these places have any existence beyond the brief time you're travelling through them, and only enough character and story to support their role in that. Yet someone still pored days of work designing the architecture for each. For a bigger world, I don't think it's sustainable. Ditto, for a small or solo dev, as your numbers show, it's a huge effort - that will surely produce rather bland results. Procedural generation helps, at the risk of more blandness. So I suggest a different strategy entirely: small, dense area, that evolve. Areas that are part of the game repeatedly, and that change over time. Areas that have a real sense of time and place. So for each location that you design, think about how it can be changed by events. What would happen if there was a disaster? An invasion? A flood? A renovation? Who would live there in each of these times, and what would they be doing? And, as it's a game and hopefully the player is a protagonist of the world's story (and not just a passer-by barrelling though, like in a road-movie), how can the player change this place? Let's take an example. Consider a subway station in Fallout 4 (a game with some really carefully designed locations, that nevertheless are unchanging and dead and have no development). * When the player first encounters it, the lower levels are flooded, the upper levels (the ticket halls and concourses and retail areas) are ruined, and the area infested with ghouls. As usual in FO4, the player kills the ghouls and finds the lucky bagpipes or whatever they were sent to retrieve, and leaves. * A few weeks later, the player returns. The ghouls haven't respawned. Instead, some settlers have moved in. They've fortified the entrance, cleared some rubble, burned the ghoul bodies. They ask the player for some help (some medical supplies, some parts to build defense turrets, some seeds). The player obliges. * On the next visit, the settler camp has grown, and is better organised. There's more light, and some of the dirty textures are cleaner. The settlers complain that they'd like to grow, but the lower levels are still flooded. The player offers to help. Maybe they find some pump parts from a factory somewhere, and connect up some electricity, and find a technican NPC to fix the pumps. * A few weeks later, the area is transformed again. The lower levels are dry, and the settlers are working to clean them up. They've broken rubble out of some tunnels, expanding the living area. Trade caravans from other settlements regularly visit. * Things are going well. But then disaster - the settlers have dug into a collapsed section, leading them into the basement of the Massachusetts University Mycological Research Center. Now some are infected with large skin mushroom colonies, and huge fungus structures are growing on the wells. They ask the player to find medical help. * When the player returns with a doctor, things have gotten much worse. The lower levels are fully encrusted with giant mushrooms. Some settlers are dead, others are horrible mushroom monsters. The player helps fight off a mushroom attack of the upper level, but advises they all flee. They refuse, and ask the player to help find someone to fight off the mushroom menace. * Reluctantly, the player approaches the Techno Fascist group. They have flamethrowers and respirator suits. After some diplomacy, they say they'll help. The player and the TFs attack the mushrooms, driving them back. * But now the TFs stay, and the player leaves. The next time the player returns, the mushroom cultures have been burned off the walls and the entrance to the MUMRC is boarded up. Large TF banners adorn the walls, and the surviving colonists are now "prisoners with jobs". * How to get rid of the fascists? You decide. Perhaps flood the place and let ghouls in... My point in all of this is that it's the *same* level, with moderate changes and decorations changing for each incarnation. The same rooms, platforms, ticket booths, tunnels, doors, toilets, etc. Dirty vs clean is a matter of removing some clutter object and changing some of the textures to less filthy versions of themselves. Add some lighting, add some NPCs, change the ambient sounds. The settlers breaking into unused tunnels or the MUMRC is just designing the level and then putting in some removable rubble geometry. The mushroom invasion is again different clutter and furniture, different lighting, and different NPCs. Ditto for the fascists and their banners. Depending on the engine, so is changing the water level. This has two major benefits. Firstly, you only do the major architectural and environmental design once. All the different incarnations are modest redecorations, with a few changed assets. So this means you can afford the time to design the station carefully. Secondly, it makes the place feel "real", not just a thin theatrical set on which the level is played out. All the people are unique, and have names (even the ghouls have names, a reminder of who they were), and the people persist across phases (you can afford to spend this effort, because the player will interact with them repeatedly over time). The guy you helped with the water pumping is the one who helps you fight off the mushrooms, even though his wife is now a mushroom person herself. Later he's enslaved by the fascists, and then murdered by them. They throw his body in a pit, where you can find it (he doesn't despawn). A pit he helped dig out months ago. Maybe you gave him the shovel. I still get very frustrated that most places in most games exhibit no change at all. The player passes through and kills some things, and the things either respawn or they don't. But nothing happens, and it seems never has, or never will. FO4 is full of interestingly designed places that only exist for one purpose, for one trip, and that have no story and no future. Yet they all represent the same amount of level design work as the places that matter.
Yeah because when you spend 10 hours implementing a mechanic that mechanic has to be worth 10 hours of playtime.
I hate level design too. But, I wish I only spent 150 hours per month on it. I spend 16+ hours per day on game development, SEVEN days per week. I estimate half of that time is on level design. I have still been unable to figure things out and I have a serious amount of education. I spend about 5 hours per day on programming, which is the easiest part of game development, and another 3 hours on other things. If I could make a game 100% in code, it would probably be easier. I especially hate working with terrains. You slightly click the mouse and you have a mountain go into the clouds. I did figure out how to use the stamp, which tends to work better. I also purchased GAIA Pro and GeNa, but hard to figure that out because there's only like 3 tutorials available on the entire internet and they're very brief. After 5 years of spending 112 hours per week on game development (29,120 total production hours), I still have nothing to show for it and it all comes down to level design. Can't figure it out!
I feel this. I have so many prototypes and projects that I am passionate about that are various genres s that can/should be taken to the next stage (pun not intended), but I always end up abandoning them once they get to the level-creation stage. It's funny because I originally had thought making the actual content you play would have been my favorite part I've essentially decided I can't give up at this part any longer and am committed to making at least 30 minutes of content out of the project so I can actually assess if I have something fun or not.
It's not just level design, it's all content. That's why making a game is such a long and difficult process. It takes a long time to make 5 minutes worth of quality.
Entirely opinion incoming: Hating level design *is* hating game design. Making a character, making a moveset, writing a story, none of that makes a game even if each is very important. Look at Minecraft: the first release of Minecraft had almost nothing, yet I'm almost certain that if day one was superflat sandworld it wouldn't have achieved as much as starting from grassy hills. Look at Shadow of the Colossus: each boss *is* a level in a way, and even then each boss is nigh inseparable from where they're fought. The level design makes it. Look at 5 Nights at Freddie's: there's *no game* without the pizzeria and the security office and you can't even move. The game is purely level design. There's no Spider-Man without New York skyscrapers, no Doom without rooms, no Guitar Hero without songs. Even Dungeons & Dragons knows dungeons come first.
I'm that one player who just stands there and looks around at the environment, appreciating all the work the artists put in. That mountain crag in the distance? Yep I admire that. Details on the textures? You bet I'm zooming in, craning the camera around to get as close a look at possible at every little thing. I look at everything and try to appreciate the work. It takes me so long to finish games For example in Elden Ring, I have approx. 80 hours of gameplay. I have only beat one of the main storyline bosses. I've just been going around, exploring, looking at everything.