Notes on level design workflow for the 3D platformer Big Hops

overview of the Ocean intro level

I made some levels for the 3D platformer game Big Hops by Luckshot Games, and it's finally released! You can now play it on Steam, Switch, and PS5.

So far the game is generally reviewing between 7/10 and 8/10. Most players like the level design, though some kinda hate it, which is fair -- we went for a chill cozy-ish no-combat experience that won't hit for everyone, but the people who like it really do like it. I'd compare it to Psychonauts or Banjo Kazooie, with some Mario Galaxy / Breath of the Wild / Sly Cooper bits.

Despite the lack of complete universal adoration, I do think we figured out decent level design practices that worked OK for this scope / type of 3D action game. Some of these dev practices may surprise you; it certainly surprised me when I realized what we were doing. So in this post, I'll talk about some of our level design workflow for Big Hops...

SPOILER ALERT: I spoil some mechanics and levels, but not in detail. I don't spoil any of the story or the ending. Don't worry about it.

Black and white and re(a)d all over: on SOD (1999), Half-Quake (2001), Jeux d'ombres (2007), and NaissanceE (2014)

Last week I finished playing through the entirety of NaissanceE (2014), an avant-garde walking sim / platformer game inspired by brutalist megastructure manga and filled with subtle callbacks to new media art. NaissanceE has a bit of a cult classic reputation among level designers and modders, due to its heavily reliance on abstraction, lack of concrete narrative, and punishing platformer sections.

To this day, the game still defies easy categorization and demographics. Who is this for?

The walking sim aficionado of that time (the Dear Esther remaster was in 2012, Proteus and The Stanley Parable remaster were in 2013) would've hated the platformer sections with instant-death traps, while the action jock might've been tempted to rage-quit with every coy architectural riddle and impossible-to-navigate dark room. Back in 2014, only a few critics dared to defend this design clash.

I think the work still holds up pretty well in 2019, and to understand why, we should take a brief trip back to 1999.

"March" by Mindful XP

"March" is a first person art-platformer in your browser (never thought I'd type that) about a relationship by some students at Carnegie Mellon.

Brief spoilery review after the jump.

A short history of non-monoplanar first person movement.

I'm working on a new game that reuses a lot of Souvenir's code, so lately I've been doing more research into non-monoplanar first person movement, meaning you're not limited to primarily moving along the X and Z axis / traversing across a single, fixed, designated "ground" plane.

Traditionally, "noclip" flying / spectator modes have been the most common form of non-planar first person movement. However, I'm not a fan of it as a movement mechanic because you're always "right side up" above a ground plane. Your idea of space never really changes because that's not the point.

Shattered Horizon (2009) was a multiplayer FPS in space, where astronauts shoot each other while hovering around asteroids. From what I can grok in gameplay videos, players can rotate and hover freely, but they almost always maintain the same common "ground plane" as if there's a "right side up" in space. Common map layout terminology and directional lighting also reinforce the idea of a "top" of the map.

What makes "good" writing on level design?

Liz Ryerson recently did a great write-up of level 5-5 from Wolfenstein 3D (and makes a good case for the surrealism of 4-3) and it occurred to me that there's a pattern to this type of writing -- it's usually very specific, talks only about a single level (but contextualizes it within the whole game), and makes ample use of screenshots to help the reader understand the layout.

Writing about level design is incredibly important because we often run through levels so fast and understand "the language of games" so intuitively that it can be difficult to verbalize and explain. In playing levels, they exist more as tools to express our intentionality, not as objects to be studied and examined. The reality of it is that it would take a long time, or sometimes it's very difficult, to gain the type of fluency in platformers or Wolf3D that the best levels require.

But this is how we do research -- we make games and play the ones we can. Articles and essays are the best way to learn about levels that you haven't played / can't play.

Here are two authors of "level criticism canon" that, in my mind, show us how to do it...

Legends of the Hidden Temple, the greatest children's game show about video games ever created

If you were a middle-class adolescent growing up in America in the 1990s, you probably had cable television -- and if you liked games, you probably watched episodes of "Legends of the Hidden Temple" on Nickelodeon.

It was the greatest children's game show ever. And it was all about platformer level design.

Lesser game shows, like the regrettable "Nick Arcade," directly referenced video games with a predictably bland execution / green screen foolishness. Boooring. (Although this clip is pretty funny.) In contrast, Legends leveraged the genre of children's game shows to make something special. It didn't try to be anything else.

Legends had it all: a relatively unique (and now, hilarious) narrative that glorified cultural imperialism, frustrating in-game tragedies that made you yell at the screen, the real-world fidelity of good set design -- and perhaps most memorably, the excellent pacing that led up to the climactic "Temple Run" at the end of each episode...

Fib

http://www.sophiehoulden.com/games/fib/

Start rumors. Say people said things that they didn't. Use their corpses as platforms. This is what a "Mean Girls" game should've been.

Fib is a pretty cool ass pants twist on the "manipulate NPCs" sub-genre of platformers, the theme for Ludum Dare 18. Ideas like this are especially great because they're (a) simple, (b) intuitive, (c) funny, (d) only work in platformers. I don't think this type of thing would work too well in an FPS setting without a lot of changes.

(Unity web player required)