How the Heck do you Teach Level Design? Educating in the Studio
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Ask anyone who has trained a new level designer or taught level design students, and they will tell you that a major challenge is balancing training for the technical aspects of the job while also teaching them "good" level design. In the studio environment, you also have to teach communication, documentation, designing for specific types of gameplay, or the elements of your studio's "style." How can we effectively mentor newcomers without taking time away from other ongoing design work? This talk by a level designer and educator with 13+ years of experience examines processes that studios can use to onboard new designers in productive and accessible ways. It does so through topics such as setting "learning goals", assigning quick-but-usable level design exercises, incorporating "style" into task specifications, and how to structure feedback. This talk incorporates both on-the-job knowledge and examples collected from education to build a roadmap for effective mentorship.
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How the Heck do you Teach Level Design? Educating in the Studio
- 1. How the heck do you teach level design? Educating in the studio Chris Totten Creative director – Team Nemo, Inc. Program Coordinator and Associate Professor – Kent State University
- 2. Chris Totten Associate professor and Program Coordinator Kent State University Animation Game Design (AGD) Founder and creative director, Team Nemo, Inc. Pie for Breakfast, LLC. Co-Founder, Smithsonian American Art Museum Arcade Author/Editor • World Design in 2D Action-Adventures (upcoming) • An Architectural Approach to Level Design (2nd edition 2019) • Level Design: Processes and Experiences (2016) • Game Character Creation in Blender and Unity (2012) Book series editor: Level Design Practices (seeking proposals!)
- 4. Takeaways This talk looks how level design mentoring works in both academic and studio environments to distill a set of repeatable best practices, with my studio’s process as a case study If you are… • A professional in a studio: you’ll see what people in other parts of the industry are doing to beef up their mentoring processes and how that gets embodied in a studio’s work • A teacher: you’ll see some case studies from academia and industry on how to teach a traditionally hard- to-teach discipline • A student: you’ll learn some work and feedback processes that hopefully make group work easier
- 5. Teaching level design? Studio environments: • Lack of clarity – “level design is just different for every game” • Lack of great mentorship – “just kind of figure it out” • Lack of feedback – “It’s like a bad [insert other game name] level” – what does that even mean? • How to meaningfully incorporate work into ongoing projects? • “Didn’t they teach you this in game design school?”
- 6. Teaching level design? Academic environments: • Not every program teaches a standard level design course • Structure – hard to teach level design without previously-built gameplay • Resources – studios use proprietary tools that universities are unable to access, so teachers have to lean on Unity and Unreal • Time – spatial design or level editor tutorials? • Also time – general info or specific genres?
- 7. Context GDC Masterclass • 8 hours – 2 times a year • 4 x 30-minute presentations on design concepts • 4 x 30-45-minute exercise build times • Discussion after each session • Different tool options for builds: tabletop, Twine, GB Studio/retro, Unity pre-made tutorial files with ProBuilder Game Design internship • Able to host students in out-of-school gamedev projects • Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends and Kudzu • 8 weeks, Summer term
- 8. What are other people doing?
- 9. Trend 1: Multiple projects • Smaller-scaled projects • Incremental check-ins and/or playtests • Clear deliverables for each increment (documentation, white/graybox, beautiful corner, etc.) • Larger-scaled projects done in teams • Reflection/postmortem afterward Author: MJ Johns
- 10. Trend 2: Theory + Practice • Learners explore standard level design concepts that apply to multiple genres • Examples from diverse sources (game design, architecture, product design, etc.) • Game analysis and thoughtful play Author: William Chyr
- 11. Trend 3: Clear project goals • Projects are introduced with clearly stated design briefs • The goals of each project are communicated to the learner • Standards for success are clearly communicated (what “good” means in this context) • Constraints are defined Authors: Rene Derks, Tim van Kan, Nick Dry, Stefan Kwak, and Angelique Stoop
- 12. Trend 4: Mentorship mindset • Set regular times for evaluation and feedback (stand-up meetings) • Feedback is structured against learning goals and established standards for success • Communicate in a commonly agreed-upon language (level design theory/concepts) • Empower improvement in your feedback (“if you do x, it will be better because y”) Image source: https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html
- 13. Learning from animation • Senior animators draw keyframes – the major poses that define character attitude and movement • Junior animators fill in the “breakdown” and “in- between” • Juniors are doing lower visibility/impact work that involves less decision making, but which develops skills and “instincts”
- 15. Technique 1: Room jam Small-scale level exercises • Create a small portion of a level in graybox • No theming – not made for specific levels • Individual encounters – not whole sequences • Save the work as prefabs rather than as key parts of implemented levels • Design briefs give clear goals of type of gameplay or experience selected so they are not trying to create a “kitchen sink”
- 16. Technique 2: Goal-driven briefs Design principle: metrics and mechanic-based design • “Design a level that emphasizes Flip (grapple swinging character) and Peony (climbing character)” • Designer has to focus on the movement capabilities of specific characters with specific mechanics • Specify any stylistic elements into the brief (“does this feel like a [insert studio name] game?”)
- 17. Design principle: “kishōtenketsu” – developing a challenge over multiple iterations
- 19. Technique 3: Levels of growth 1 exercise, 3 levels of learning • Surface level: Practicing with the tool – learner is getting experience with the software • Conceptual level: design practice – learner is practicing a design principle • Personal level: forming good collaborative habits – require the learner to interact with other team members in productive ways (feedback, working with other units, etc.)
- 20. Technique 4: Effective feedback • If you do the “compliment sandwich” – actually do it well (don’t make it the “s**t sandwich”) • Compliment > critique > empower critique > compliment • Frequent stand-up meetings • Have a common language for discussing level design principles • Keep things in terms of the goals outlined in the brief
- 21. Bonus technique: Pull back on tech • Don’t be afraid to use simple tools for educational exercises • Not everything has to be in-engine • Big engines = overwhelming possibility • Big engines = battling dumb tech things when trying to practice design • Simpler tech can be a good place to practice really complex concepts like non-linear exploration and progression • Sketchbooks, paper prototypes, Twine, GB Studio
Editor's Notes
- Hello there! I’m Chris Totten. Thank you for coming to my talk, “How the Heck do you Teach Level Design” First of all, please make sure to silence any cell phones or other noisemakers and be sure to fill out your electronic surveys afterward.
- So, who am I and why am I up here? I’m an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for the Animation and Game Design program at Kent State University. I’ve been in the industry for about 14 years doing game art and level design for lots of indie, mobile, serious games, and other types of game projects. My latest 2 games are Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends and a Game Boy game called Kudzu. I’ve also published several books on level design including An Architectural Approach to Level Design and am working on a new book about level design in 2D action-adventures. And…if anyone is thinking about writing a new book on level design, specifically for a particular genre, please catch me after the talk.
- From the title, this SOUNDS like a talk for teachers from over at the Educators Summit, but the highest-level, most basic takeaway of this talk is how to integrate the processes of mentoring and educating into a productive level design pipeline in the studio environment, though this can also be easily migrated into classroom or small group projects.
- Based on conversations I’ve had about teaching level design to others, I found some best practices both from university level design courses and industry environments, then tested these practices in our work on Little Nemo. Real quick, here are some takeaways for different potential members of the audience…
- The reason this talk exists is that in studio environments, mentoring seems to be an issue. Part of this is that while folks may be great at the skills of level design, they are not trained very well in how to mentor others, and it can lead to some not-great feedback and situations of the kinds we see here. One example that’s stuck with me is from this very summit several years ago, where a speaker (whose name and studio I’ll keep anonymous), told the story about how, after designing their first area for a famous AAA game, their manager told them that it looked like a bad level from [studio’s previous game], and that’s it. The designer said this was really confusing, because while they knew their studio’s previous games, they didn’t know exactly what the manager wanted. At the same time, mentoring in the studio environment IS hard, because how do you teach someone to do the job while not eating up production time when there are real production goals to hit?
- And you sometimes hear “why didn’t they teach you this in school?” Well, let’s look at school! I’m asked a lot “how the heck do you teach level design?”, which is where the talk’s title comes from. But university professors face an uphill battle teaching level design.
- Now, I have taught a lot of level design, both as part of the GDC Masterclass series and at Team Nemo, where we have hosted students from Kent State as level design interns.
- But in tackling the question of how to build effective mentorship, I didn’t want to act like I had all the answers, so I reached out to friends in the industry AND collected syllabi from level design courses from different college games programs, particularly ones taught by industry veterans.
- So here are some promising trends that I saw: The first is that there seemed to be a tendency towards having lots of smaller-scaled tasks or projects, rather than a few big ones. They were treated like rapid prototyping work, with lots of tests and check-ins, and each task had a clear deliverable – including a description of the gameplay goal and the level of production.
- Promising trend 2 was that these tasks were designed to incorporate both technical work and learning about good design. In the academic syllabi in particular, part of the tasks included not only doing the work, but also playing different example games or reading articles related to the kind of design that the instructor wanted. If you’re thinking “we can’t do this in the studio”, this is where design libraries like the one found at Blizzard can come in handy.
- Promising trend 3 is that design tasks or projects are always given clear goals. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard when talking to folks in the industry about this is that their manager will tell them something like “figure it out” or say “make it like a good level from our studio’s last game” – all of which are really vague, undescriptive, and do not set juniors up for success.
- Promising trend 4 is that mentoring and feedback were treated as explicit tasks. In the examples I found, mentoring and feedback time was part of the schedule, not just done off the cuff, and feedback was given in a careful, structured, way with clear connections to the project goals and indicators of how suggested changes would improve the work.
- Because I’m an indie developer, I wear all the hats, which means that I’m an animator in addition to a level designer. I’ve been interested in how senior animators historically mentored their junior colleagues: senior animators in traditional animation studios would draw the keyframes, which were the major poses of an animation, then assign the drawings that would go between those poses to the junior animators. This saved the senior animator time, but would give the junior practice on a task with the clear constraint of transitioning between poses.
- Looking at these trends, we came up with some techniques for mentoring in our internships for Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends. For context, the game is hand-animated game based on a fantasy comic strip from 1905 called Little Nemo in Slumberland, where this kid, Nemo, goes on adventures inside his own dreams. For gameplay, it’s a 2D exploratory platformer where you can swap between 4 different characters, which are Nemo and his friends from the comic, at any time. And each character has their own unique platforming abilities.
- Technique 1 was what we called “room jam”: taking a cue from both the promising trend of small projects, and our look at animation mentoring, we decided that an effective practice would be to give interns small-scaled projects, which were single rooms. Within our project, our pipeline to accommodate this was to not have interns work in our main project level scenes, but to have them build each room in graybox in their own scenes. These rooms were then saved as prefabs, which could be imported into the main level files.
- Technique 2: goal driven briefs: part of teaching someone to design well is giving them clear goals of what good design looks like with things like project goals, constraints, and a clear set of deliverables. In our work with interns, we would give them tasks based on a specific level design principle, such as having a level emphasize the particular movement characteristics of one or more of the playable characters.
- This is where we could educate about design within a practical task. We could take something like kishotenketsu – the 4 stage process of developing a challenge by introducing it, escalating it, providing a twist on it, then creating the “final exam” level for it – and put that into the deliverables for a task. These examples are from one where the designer had to build a set of increasingly complex rooms that emphasized the synergy between our climbing and grappling characters.
- Doing this as un-themed grayboxes then saving them as prefabs gave our senior designers a stable of already-made rooms that they could pull from when designing our actual level maps, then reskin for that environment’s biome.
- Technique 3 is something I practice in both the studio and in the classroom, which is designing the tasks that I ask learners to do around 3 levels of growth. The “surface”, or most recognizable to an outside observer, is that the learner gets time and experience with the skill. Most mentors or instructors will stop there, but really good ones will think about how the skill develops the mentee as a designer AND how the task develops them as a professional. Even rote tasks have a designer designing to a goal, giving and taking feedback, and collaborating, so talk through those with your mentees.
- The last technique is learning to give effective feedback. Everyone knows about the “compliment sandwich” technique, but not everyone uses it effectively. Some call it another kind of sandwich because a manager used the critique part in the middle to berate their mentees or only say “it sucks.” Effective guidance means giving detailed, constructive critique, and telling the mentee HOW changes will make the design better. In the studio, establish a regular time for this feedback to occur and give feedback in easily understood language – “it could do this level design principle better” and not “it’s like a bad level from our studio’s other game”
- And as a bonus technique – don’t be afraid to use simple tools as a way to have junior level designers practice. Not everything has to be in-engine and if you want someone (or yourself) to learn complex design stuff - like managing progression in a metroidvania – it can be easier to do that in simple tools where you don’t waste time battling tech things unrelated to the learning.
- So that’s it! I’ve got a few minutes left for questions, and here are some places that you can reach me. Thank you!