Reading 4
This week I have completed the rest of the academic readings.The biggest difficulty I have faced was to understand what exactly the reading is talking about and how to write an overview of what you have read.The second thing was that I got stuck and I couldn't find any more relative papers based on my topic which is Level design process in games but then I used research-gate which I found really helpful and it really helped me with completion of the readings that I had left to do.Overall I am happy with what I have written I think that I have collected a lot of relevant information based on my topic and a learned a lot about level design and things that are involved in the process of creating a game.
Readings!
“Bad Level design can ruin a good game”. Which means that game level design is as strong as a game design. Which shows us that level design and game design are pretty much equal in terms of development of the game. Even though they are not identical, but they wouldn’t be able to work without each other.
During the history of level design various people tried to describe their professional experience based on level design which I thought would be very interesting to read here are some of the examples:
Jay Wilbur-The most important thing that Jay Wilbur has mention that level design is about making sure that the player fully understands game rules and also understanding game elements to apply them in practice.
Sam Sharami- “He says that level designers are responsible for gameplay implementation”
John Romero-says that level designer has a very responsible position because maps are the place where the game is taken place and where everything is starting. So, it has to be done in the way to express the mood of the game and the environment.
From the various views on level design there is a lot of different ways to approach a good
level design it touches fact that level design is responsible for gameplay implementation. This book about theory, concept and practice is very interesting and explains a lot about level design process and how it is implemented in various ways. From this book I learned how bad level design can ruin a good game and got a better understanding on how those two things relate to each other and how important it is to consider those to two statements when making a game.
Adapting Holistic approach to level design
There is a term from film studies which says, “the use of space within the frame”. We know games and films are completely different things. Main difference is that games allows player to develop their choice at each stage of the game and movies they project unbroken sequence throughout the scene that can’t be changed by the viewer
But they are similar in the way that both of them tell a story with an ending in this case they are very similar. In different game levels player can decide the outcome or make a decision that will change ending of the game which is not possible in movies because the article is saying that it’s an unbroken sequence which develops the story line. In every game level the player Is offered to explore alternatives that are offered in each level contra positives and so on. The player can play the game many times trying different ways of solving a problem and also coming up with different strategies. Henry Jenkins and Lev Manovich, they wrote that game develops during the process of a player in the game environment. Game designers they don’t just tell a story they “design world and sculpt space”. Level design has always been more interesting to game developers than plotting or character motivation. Paper also mentions that short videos really help to add some interest to the level and the game plot. For example video trailer of a gameplay lets player see of what is in the game and in what way the levels are constructed.
https://summit.sfu.ca/item/190
Procedural Natural Systems for Game Level Design
The level of details in game development and level design has increased dramatically and also importance of level design has grown a lot. I the paper is says that in current time a lot of time is spent low-level operations for example applying texture to different game objects and adding decorations like threes, mountains in connection with level and expectation that have increased a lot of time goes into creating little things and putting a lot of details into it.But there are few ways which can decrease the amount of time and people to create game levels. First one is a highly specialized person that can be adding grass and plants to a level. The second is better developed tools that allow game designer to complete the process of creating a level a lot faster but that doesn’t mean that there is less work for designers it means that some of the heavy lifting work can be on computer. Another very important factor in level design content is generation of content it’s a very important topic for game developers over the last thirty years to create high quality models for specific environment and lanscapes.Content generation has found its way in a variety of different commercial products which are very helpful in different specific purposes some examples of that a tool called XFrog helps game designers to generate a tree model by a very simple model of tree with some simple parameters .There are also game engines for variety of purposes “City Engines 2010” which helps level designers with a city constructions and speeds up the process of creating city.GeoControl is used for creation of terrains in great details. The paper is very interesting, and it covers importance of level design and also tools to create a level.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224238422_Procedural_Natural_Systems_for_Game_Level_Design
A Video Game Level Analysis Model Proposal
Analysis of a video game described in the paper consist of four elements. Video Game, Players, Metrics and Gaming Experience.
Video game it talks about game genres this model supports variety of genres like” first person shooters, third-person, role-playing, real time strategy”. All genres explain the fact that they all include a gameplay of a character which is placed in more than one level.
For each genre 3D levels in the game can presented on a 2D game maps where the game takes place. Then the 2D layer where data would be analyzed. Player- in this topic they are talking about its importance in the game. Because that’s what the games are designed for to entertain and satisfy players. Player and the act of players behavior is depending on many different factors for example players skills, their ability to play games and also their past experience. Crawford is a term that encourages people to paly games. The author highlights that as a motivation to learn something new and discover all the different things for the player. There might be a lot of factors that are motivating player to play this game things like exploring, discover and more. Also, players skill has an effect on a player completing the game and how the player will experience the level. Game Metrics is used in a game to describe the game and other metrics that is used to analyses context. Complexity of each genre will define type of metrics in the game. Example of some game Metrics would be time, energy, health. Gaming experience is a very important factor of the game that the player ‘quality of a level and direct result of the quality of a level and is therefore a relevant of the model”. Details in the game like player movement, environment, death and other things have a huge effect a game experience and players level completion.
Content Creation for a 3D Game
Level design forms the game environment depending on the level design content creation and technical collectivity. Scheduling the biggest amount of work is carried in the creation of a game level process because it requires engine to be finished and assets need to be completed to work with them. Concurrent working on varies game levels is hard to complete because it can result “high organization and merging overhead”. For a small game creation of environment one person is more sufficient in order to avoid huge budget spent on a creation of a small game. For a large game creation each level can be separated between designers. Asset placement is a very important part of creation a game world. Open world games often require a lot of game objects to be placed on the world map in order to produce rich feeling of a game. Automatic placement helps to speed up the process of placing assets in the game world. For large projects advanced level tools are used to speed up the process of creating a large game for example drawing a map of the area while the concept is placed automatically. Which saves a lot of time for game designers to create a satisfying level and add the assets a lot faster which allows them to complete. Lightning and Sound are also important in the level creation because they add life to game levels and also create an environment for a player. Sound can also add some dramatic effect to the level for more realistical gameplay.
file:///Users/roman2001/Downloads/Content_Creation_for_a_3D_Game_with_Maya_and_Unity.pdf
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