How level designers make us feel smart

Ubisoft Toronto level design director Matt West will never approve a four-meter-high wall. Three-meter-high walls look scalable, he told me over the phone, and five-meter-high walls look unscalable, but four meters high? That s a confusing wall. You ve got to run up to it and mash a key to find out if you can climb it screw that, get rid of it.

West works on some of Ubisoft s big open world games, including Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal , which feature vast environments. At the same time, another level designer, Nina Freeman, is wondering what someone s bathroom might look like. Freeman started her career studying poetry in New York, where she developed an appreciation for 70s and 80s poets and vignettes about ordinary life and people s life experiences. She s now a level designer at Gone Home developer Fullbright, working on science fiction exploration game Tacoma , and thinking about how people live on a spaceship: What s on the dinner table? Who left a sock on the floor?

Putting a light at the end of a hallway, according to West, will nearly always attract the player s attention.

Freeman probably thinks about wall height too, but level design is such a broad pursuit that gunfights and Jeeps and mountain tops and stray socks exist in the same discipline. It involves psychology and storytelling and logic mechanisms and architecture and ecology. Rand Miller, one of the creators of Myst (along with his brother, Robyn Miller) and the recent Obduction , was designing levels nearly 30 years ago as black and white still frames, and says he still hasn t really figured it out yet completely.

I interviewed West, Freeman, and Miller as well as a couple other level designers over email looking for commonalities in their work. I wanted to see what sort of tricks they use to guide players. Putting a light at the end of a hallway, according to West, will nearly always attract the player s attention and that s the sort of thing I was after. But 10 wild and wacky tricks level designers use to totally Criss Angel mindfreak us didn t turn out to be exactly the story I found. What fascinated me is how much else these designers share in common, whether they re making a firefight or a puzzle or a crumpled note on a kitchen floor, and how they seek to gently guide us toward clever thoughts.

A lot has changed, but Obduction's Myst roots are clear.

Clear, but not obvious

West describes level design as the practical counterpart to game design s theoretical art if a creative director decides what kinds of decisions and experiences should be in a game, the level designer creates specific decisions and experiences. Even on the practical side of game design I found that there s a lot of theory, but wall height is important too. In the practical work and testing, you see echoes of the big ideas.

When there are boundaries that aren t walls, for instance, Warframe s lead level designer Ben Edney tries to make them clear, but at the same time, not obvious through differences in materials and lighting. Before having heard that, I coincidentally asked Miller how he makes his obscure worlds, which hint at puzzle solutions, clear, but not obvious. He laughed and acted flustered. That s one of the challenges he s been experimenting with