Game worlds layouts-Joseph Dolan

 Game worlds layouts-Joseph Dolan  

 

 

Intro  

Immersive, That's what a good world layout or design needs. When designing a level you're not doing it simply to fill space in your game. The world MUST be built with purpose. The world should tell a story, have character, and should serve a larger overall purpose than a place for your character to occupy. The level can tell a story subtly, many game designers over the years have made entire games based on this principle. (Fire Watch, Darksouls, The Forest) but the real question is how we implement these changes? How do we make a level immersive how do we give a level character? They are the questions we shall be covering in this chapter along with many other hurdles. “The vision was always to make this really beautiful, interesting world, and then try to use that as a base to scare people”-Ben Falcone Director of the forest. Here we can see someone's design principle of using the game world to Invert your expectations. This single design choice changes the entire flow of the game, creating an environment in which you can lose yourself the definition of immersive.  

  

Types of game layout  

There are many types of game layouts seen in the gaming world today. We have the top-down 2D roguelikes and two 2D platformers up to the hyper-realistic 3D open-world games. The consistency with all these games is that you almost always follow one of two layouts. Preset or linear layouts and procedurally generated layouts.,  

Procedurally generated  

In the procedurally generated layouts, we have games like Minecraft and Terraria, and Valheim. these games have presets to have the world should be formed and structures that can be formed in the world other than that they are entirely random so thought has to be put in as to how these worlds can generate but not the world itself. These games you would think would struggle with implementing the changes mentioned in the introduction. This train of thought would be wrong. These have managed to create a random world that will always consist of the same story by generating premade structures in this world at random locations. This is often referred to as a dungeon. These structures are used to progress the Storey of the given game by ether being hope to different items of enemies or by the structure its self(summoning circle) The main Level Design will be put into these areas as they are the areas that are telling the story. These worlds are also very immersive as the player has free rain to edit them as they please. This is since these games are all in the sandbox genre of games. (Graham Smith 27apr,2021)  

  

Linear layouts  

For a world to be linear the player cannot wander off as much as they can in your procedurally generated or open-world game. These limiters are often implemented to keep the player interacting within a certain area and help the game world around you to drive and empower the story. We can see an example of this implemented well with the last of us. “Players were immediately thrown into a situation where they were immersed off the bat!-Jennifer Mendez. These restrictions the world puts on the player forces them to experience the story, in the same way, every time. This isn't the case with all Linear layouts, but this is the case for many of the story-driven games. One example is fallout 3. This game has a premade world same as the last of us. The difference is that Fallout 3 is free to roam from. The moment you leave the safety of the vault you are free to experience the game in your unique way. This in turn allows the player to follow the characters and storylines that they want to, and not follow the predetermined Storey lines of games like last of us. These two games still both follow an overall narrative but the time it takes the play to complete these is drastically different. The last of us come in with a respectable 15-25 hours on average but is overshadowed by the towering 58 hours of fallout 3. This is due to the pacing the world layout allows. The open-world element of fallout 3 allows the player to explore the map and find side quests and side adventures. The layout restraints of last of us doesn't allow for such gameplay but allows for a better structured and detailed Storey. (Jennifer Mendez may 15 2016)  

 

 

Conclusion.  

With these 2 examples we can understand that some games lend themselves better to an open world and free roam design, whilst others are best left too confined and linear designs. Ultimately when you're designing, there should be thorough testing and implementing of many different types of world layout and design. As seen in the document many different types of stories and gameplay greatly can lend themselves to different types of layouts. The thing to keep in mind is that open wide world layout will not lend itself well to enclose story based game. as a game developer you need to make the distinctions and the decisions as to what you think the player will enjoy. 

 

Bibliography 

Approaches for Serious Game Design: A Systematic Literature Review Aug 2020 Diego Avila-Pesantez & Luis A. Rivera & Mayra Susana Alban Taipe 7-8 

 

Educational Video Game Design: A Review of the Literature, Mary Jo Dondlinger Doctoral Student Department of Technology & Cognition, College of Education University of North Texas 22- 25 

The best survival games on PC, Rock paper shotgun, editor-in chief Graham Smith 27 Apr 2021 

 

 Level Design Vs. Environment Design. Medium. Josh Bycer. 2018 

Game design open world vs linear, black shell media, Jennifer Mendez may 15,2016 

Ben Falcone, creative lead at end night games. Alex D'Alessandro 

 

 

Author Bio 

Joseph Dolan, a video editor and author from Rathcoffey kildare Ireland. Joseph is enrolled in his second year as a creative digital media student in T you Dublin Blanchardstown. Joseph enjoys editing and creating entertaining content while also enjoying computer gaming and other forms of creative media on the side.