Hey friendos! Spring is approaching and that means love is in the air. For this week’s edition, I will share my first love of making games. Before I was a narrative designer, before I was a technical artist, before I was a Unity developer and before I was a game artist; I was a level designer at heart. Sort of… let’s get into it!

How Am I Doing?

I’m feeling great and I’m actively surfing a wave of nostalgia. Last week, we talked about Heroes of Might and Magic, a game I’ve been playing since I was a kid. Me and some friends have been playing it almost every day since that newsletter came out. Sadly, we ran into a limitation: there are only a handful of multiplayer maps designed for the amount of players we total. Most of the maps are also not symmetrical or don’t even pretend to be balanced in any way. So naturally, like the game makers we are, we fired up the map editor and started chipping away at our own.

What Am I Doing?

Mind you, this is a game from 2006 and that map editor is probably even from before that. To illustrate what kind of obsolete tool we’re working with: there is no undo option to revert a mistake. The process was frustrating, but nonetheless, we managed to put a semblance of a map together. All the while, something tickled the inside of my skull. A long-forgotten memory, tucked away in a dusty fold of my brain. I’ve used this editor before!

Of course I had! As a kid, if a game had any sort of level editor that I was aware of, I’d at least try to build something basic in it. A lot of these tools were a little above my pay grade as a 10-year-old, but level editors for top-down strategy games, I could manage. I must have spent hundreds of hours constructing pretty environments for Age of Empires II, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and Heroes of Might and Magic III. I think at some point, I gravitated towards those types of games just to check out the level editors.

Back then, I thought that game development in its entirety, was just that part. What else could it have been, if not for creating little worlds and stories within them? Of course, I didn’t realize that game development was a (semi-)viable career path either, so I never had any lofty ambitions while making these maps. I just did it because I enjoyed it, apparently more than actually playing the game.

I think I’ve always been like that, even before I started playing games. I’d read a story, or watched a movie, and then imagined my own story in that world and with those characters. I’d think of myself as Legolas while swinging a stick around, fending off a horde of imaginary goblins. Not in reenactment, though. In a new place that could exist in Middle-Earth. A place that was thematically viable within the confines of the Lord of the Rings, but in my mind, creatively distinct. Generally speaking, I was fascinated by the potential of new stories in a world I was immersed in.

Spaces with Stories

I have a clear memory of booting up RPG Maker 2000 to make a ripped sprite of Goku jump over a bunch of crocodiles in a swamp. I think the idea was that it was part of Goku’s early training regime and that level acted as a sort of tutorial/introduction to a game that never existed. I had no experience making assets, so I used whatever was available to me: the default engine’s art assets, Sum 41 songs converted to midi, and character sprites ripped from various SNES games. What a time to be alive!

I never thought of real, tangible rules or gameplay mechanics either. I just focused on creating little pieces of a world I had in my head. Sometimes that involved gameplay, sometimes dialogue, sometimes I focus solely on item descriptions, but most of the time it was creating maps. I love creating spaces that feel thematically cohesive. You bet that there was a forest area, mountain area, swamp area and snow area in every single one of them. Surprising absolutely no one, I also love theme parks and their design.

I think my fascination boils down to two things: creating a story for a space and having clear limitations. At first, a space does not have a story by itself. The arrangement of objects in that space could tell a story: is it a neatly ordered warehouse, or a chaotic storage shed? The conditions of the building materials tell a story: is it clinically clean and well-maintained, or weathered by misuse? Are you telling a story about a person and the space they influence, or are you telling a story about how nature shaped the space you find yourself in? All these elements help to tell a story through visceral means, without ever needing to say a word.

Technical Limitations, Creative Solutions

Then the limitations. The design of a theme park is strongly restricted by the flow of people. You don’t want crowds to clutter at the same spot. You don’t want queues to be too long. You want to direct people to new attractions and away from ones that are under construction. In level design, you want to direct players to the critical path but leave wiggle room for exploration and secrets. Then there’s also using pre-made assets, specific missions to implement, working with an established IP, and many more limitations that come with development.

Adhering to these limitations forces creative solutions for technical problems. I love working within boundaries like that, it gives me a starting point and strong guidelines. It’s a great way to fight the blank canvas problem a lot of creatives seem to have. It’s also incredibly meditative to move around assets and give them their rightful place in a holistic space. But who knows, maybe I just like it when things are neatly tucked away into categories.

(Bonus picture of homm5)

Why Am I Doing? (this)

Last week, I did a lot of heads-down coding on Clysmoids and made significant progress. My initial goal for a full gameplay loop by the end of March is within grasp. That being said, there’s still no art or even content at all, but all the systems are in place.

I needed to rest my brain after all that programming, so naturally, I clutched at the first opportunity that came along. This time, that just happened to be map-making. I’l probably do a run through of that map if I ever get close to finishing it!

I never became a professional Level Designer in the end. I don’t remember it ever being my goal either, but now I kind of wonder how I would function in that capacity. If you have some part-time, freelance Level Design work available for a junior in the field, shoot me a message! 😉