KEY TOPICS IN GAME & LEVEL DESIGN
Unlock your potential in game and level design with our specialized classes, training, and workshops. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, our sessions cover key topics in game design to enhance your skills and knowledge.
Minute to Minute Gameplay
GAME CONCEPT
How do you make an efficient game concept and formalize it properly? It is one of the key topics in game design. What’s the promise, the fantasy, your positioning on the market, your Unique Selling Point and your Brand Signature. Is your concept adapted to your development ‘power’, what is the ‘second to second’ /core gameplay(s), how a typical average session is structured, what is/are the loops, what’s the meta and long term engagement, what’s for release, what’s for live, etc…
CORE GAMEPLAY
The core gameplay of your game is the most important part of your game fun. It has to be excellent. Crafting good gameplay is a combo of several elements. Creating an interesting challenge (refers to Rational Game Design). Proposing an excellent game-feel (how fluid and comfortable the 3C are including the signs and Feedbacks).
PROTOTYPING
What is Prototyping? It means transforming theoretical ideas into something concrete that you can evaluate. Its objective is to identify what element works, what does not, and also to reveal new ideas you weren’t able to have before playing it. It does not always mean software. You can use Legos, toys, white boards, and mix them. So you can already visualize space, situations, and unanticipated problems. For this reason it saves money, time, and motivation because it saves high-cost production efforts.
RATIONAL GAME DESIGN
RGD is a mindset and a methodology that we developed inside UbiSoft 15 years ago. It allows you to secure the quality of your gameplay, your level design, and the overall player engagement at any moment. It’s core is about analyzing the challenge via the player’s abilities and understanding what makes it fun, if it’s adapted to player skills so they can progress.
In conclusion this method is the secret sauce under the famous sentence: ‘Easy to learn, hard to master’.
ACCESSIBILITY - Signs & Feedbacks
Signs are indications before taking action, feedbacks are information giving you the result of actions you just performed. They are mandatory in every game both for action or more mental gameplay. You need to identify them, prioritize them, and find the best way to express them via animations, sounds, VFX, etc…
Game Skeleton
LOOP CONCEPTION
Depending on the type of game you develop and the platform destination, you may need more than 1 loop. The classic mobile games loop ‘Prepare, Play, Upgrade’ may not be enough if you want to develop a bigger game. Several types of loops must be defined in games, they are the skeleton and define the reward system. Usually OCR (Objective, Challenge, Reward) is one of the different dimensions. It needs to be defined for various durations (from second to second to meta), different gameplays (survival loop, quests loops, shooter loop, etc…) and will also be connected to the other types of loops.
PROGRESSION SYSTEM
A player who does not feel he/she is progressing is a player who stops playing. Progression is the key to player engagement, from minute-to-minute to mid-term objectives, to sessions, to chapters, etc… It is made by rewards, empowerment, difficulty distribution, loops, etc… In effect it’s the skeleton of your game pacing and rythm is the heart of your experience quality.
GAME PACING
In every experience, the secret sauce is the right pacing. Is it too slow, too fast, too calm, too overwhelming, too social, too difficult, or too easy? Rhythm is what creates the underground emotional dynamics that keep you engaged. Gameplay pacing relates to progression, variety, and tension spread inside the game duration. Emotional pacing is conditioned by the immersion and the staging which are themselves conditioned by the narrative. Mixing both is the art of properly conceiving and tweaking your Emotional Scores.
SCOPE MAPPING
Scope is one of the 3 Production criteria able to influence the delivery (with time and quality). How do you control and secure your scope, not only from a production point of view (production lists and jiras are already helping a lot) but how do you guarantee the right scope coming from game design and still creates a consistent experience? How can you guarantee it’s both, enough to obtain a good pacing and not too much to deliver ? A simple Rational Duration Mapping tool allows to keep it under control from the Game Design source of requests.
World Consistency
World Building
The World is the hero of your game. One world, several systems, dozens of characters, hundreds of stories. It’s not just a background, it’s the most important part. Defining your world naturally feed your Game Design, Level Design, and Narrative. It needs to be consistent, with its own logic, timeline, population, etc… This is not only valid for Open World Games, it’s true for all games.
HOW TO MAKE AN OPEN WORLD
Most of the open world games follow the same structure articulated around progressive exploration and openings of new activities with an adapted level of challenge. You can either think out of the mold or architect your game on this existing structure but in any case, it’s key to know how it works and create a solid proposition. In general Ubi Soft games, the last Zelda games, or even GTA follow this pattern, up to you to master it.
RATIONAL LEVEL DESIGN
Gameplay ingredients distribution following pacing rules and progression rules, respecting the features, skills, or weapons you distribute over the game is key to guaranteeing the best possible flow. The RLD methods include tools to conceive and include Wow moments and a variety of experience flavors for a low cost of development, using a subtractive method. Connection with emotional distribution and narrative beats is also part of the method.
GENERATING EMERGENCE in your game
Emergent gameplay is defined by unexpected events happening in the game that designers have not planned and that create surprises, player creativity, and expression. Unexpected events are simply complex systems collisions. Like propagation, virality, AI behavior loops, physics, etc… Simple matrix allows one to prepare for possible emergence and plan or create it in advance, allowing one to stage it properly and create surprise and wow moments.
High Level key Topics in game design
META GAME
How do you keep your players when the game is supposed to be finished, when the story is done, and when the progression is over? The meta-structures must propose a dynamic and strategic system that can be solo or socially oriented. In both cases it must not only prolongate but open new horizons to the game, re-using the funding features and data. It must propose new modes and open new doors so that the game can become live.
PLAYTESTING
When to test, what to test, how to test, and who should test? Depending on the progress of the production, know how to use your employees and/or colleagues to get feedback, carry out focus tests during the concept to validate your ideas on your target audience, do Usability tests on specific features or gameplay in the gym. Start the playtests for gaming experience only from the alpha stage. Testing is essential but doesn’t get the test, the public, or the moment wrong.
DESIGN DOCUMENTATION
What’s the most efficient format and information granularity, how to document game design, and at which moment of pre-production or production? No one reads long documents. But without documents no one knows what needs to be done and no one can validate. Design documents must answer micro, middle, and high-level concepts and needs. What documents must be written by the Game Director, lead game designer, or designers? The director establishes the frame which leans, pillars, and direction, it also needs to define the game architecture. Lead designers and designers must also own smaller topics and own what they have conceived and iterated with their team partners. And finally, Design documents are not Jira but support for Jira.
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