Figment Dev Blog #6 - Figment Level Design Process 101

Hej everyone!

We hope you had a nice holiday. This article is a follow-up on the video we released last month, presenting our level design team (aka Jesper Sørensen and Andreas Thomsen) and their work process. We wanted to explain a bit more about our level creation process, with a bit of game theory input. We don’t want to spoil the game by presenting a particular level in detail, so instead, we will go through the process and ideas behind the birth of every playable part of the game.

The process starts with Jonas (our lead designer), Niels (sound and game designer) and Stefan (our lead artist). Whenever the team needs to start working on a new “Act” of the game, the three of them have lengthy discussion about said Act. How will the story evolve in this new act? What mood should be conveyed? What game mechanics should be used to empathize these intentions? What should be the art direction of the Act? As said in the video, the team focus is equally divided between visuals, gameplay and sounds, so all parts of the new Act-concept needs to be in tune before the team really starts working on it.

Once they agree on the direction, they present it to the rest of the team, in the form of a rough layout for level and event ideas. That’s where Jesper and Andreas can start working on the individual level designs. At this point, they will know the gameplay mechanics they’ll need to explore and what major assets will need to be in place. It is their job to convey as faithfully as possible, through the level design, the intentions of the Act.

A view of a second act level, in Unity.

Let’s now focus on the making of a single level.

The four axis on which Figment rests are puzzles, combat, exploration and storytelling. They obviously all have different weight: for example, story telling is the “bigger picture”, so in general you’ll only see sprinkles of it in every level, whereas exploration can be a big part of one level and a small part of another one. Each level must be a different, balanced mix of these four elements.

The first step to that perfect blend will be to settle on the layout of the level. Figment is build chronologically, meaning that the first level will always be made before the second, the second Act before the third, etc. The levels themselves are pretty open and can be completed in different ways, but we still have a rough idea of the progression of the player inside each level. This allows the level designers to control and tailor the progression and overall experience of the player. This also means that for every level, Jesper and Andreas know what is coming before and after, and how the level being worked on should relate to them.

The player experience and gameplay will come and develop from their evolution in the game space, which is why the layout comes first. Depending on the intent of the level (stress-focused, reflection-focussed), Jesper and Andreas will place “islands” on a blank canvas and connect them in the most interesting way. Making it that way allows them to place “breathings” in between challenges (may they be physical or intellectual), which will then be used to put storytelling in place, which may either come from the environment or from voice over.

The path to one of the Island, with an intimidating pendulum blocking the way.

These layout brainstorming-sessions also allow Jesper and Andreas to talk precisely about how the mechanics of the Act will be developed in-game. For example, if they have to implement boxes to be pushed, they could either be pushed to free the player’s path or to put weight on a specific switch. Once precise uses of the mechanic have been settled upon, Andreas and Jesper part ways to work on their best strength: Andreas creates said mechanics and Jesper starts implementing the layout in the engine (Unity) to test the pacing.

Once Andreas has created the new prefabs, chuncks of code to implement directly the new mechanics on the game canvas, Jesper and him can start prototyping puzzles. Depending on the level intentions, the goal is to create as many as possible that would fit said intentions, the more the better. Once their inspiration has given their all, it’s time to sort all this work and keep the best puzzles. There’s no clear-cut rules that define what are “the bests”: it mostly depends on their location in the game. If it’s an early puzzle, it should be accessible to all players; if it’s a puzzle to get a collectible, it should be hard, etc. Even if two of them have the same difficulty, they may not fit together because of the way you solve them: they may be too close to (or too far from) each other, and thus wouldn’t work in the same level.

It is a good time to introduce an important aspect of game theory: the flow. What is it exactly?

The “flow” is a special mindset that can be reached when you are completely focused on an activity. You’ve surely already experienced it without knowing it: the world around you seems to fade, time doesn’t exist anymore, and you are completely into what you are doing at the current time: may it be talking with someone or enjoying a hobby. As game developers, our goal is to get and retain the player’s focus as long as possible. For that, the usual way to go is to challenge the player regularly with increasingly complex situations to resolve. Make them too easy and the player will be bored ; make them too hard and the player will be frustrated. Here’s a visual chart, to help you visualize it:

Ideal Flow chart

Flow is a tricky concept to handle and apply. Some games work by being easy all the time, other works by being utterly hard right from the get-go. It really depends on the kind of game you want to make and to whom you want to make it. If you want to learn more about it, the most renown psychologist who studied flow is (hold your horses) Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, and Jesse Schell gave an interesting explanation in his game development focused book The Art of Game Design - A Book of Lenses.

“Flow” thus shapes all elements of a game: its overall structure, its “chapter” structure and level design structure. And, as you know, Figment is a game. When designing a level, Jesper and Andreas have to take this flow into account and pace the puzzles, combats and overall difficulty to keep the player entertained without pushing them too much.

After picking the best suited puzzle and combat situation for the level, Jesper and Andreas can put them together on the canvas Jesper made and test it with other designers in the company. As a game designer, it is important to get feedbacks early on to figure out the strengths and flaws of your work to magnify and correct them respectively. We start this process in house, with coworkers, but nothing forbids you from testing the first iterations of your levels with colleagues, close friends or other game developers.

Feedbacks thus come and improvements go. The levels go as many times as needed through the company to be tested and enhanced, as much gameplay as visuals-wise. Then, usually when an Act is in a presentable state (it doesn’t have to be 100% finished), it is tested with outsiders (recurring or new players). These playtests are a bit peculiar, and demand a different organization, which is why we’ll stop the explanations here! Be sure we’ll tell you all about our process in a future article.

We hope you liked this introduction to level design. As always, you can follow the development of Figment on Facebook, Twitter or by subscribing to the mailing list at the bottom of this page.

Until next time: cheers!

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