They are not Speed Level Designs. they are Speed builds.

Nooo, you changed your way of saying "linear" 😭

great video! love the example with informed simplicity!

Thank you for vary valuable video!

This is an older video but what I'm getting from this is "Unreal Editor For Fortnite" would be probably one of the best ways to get good at level design? I definitely see what you mean having to build everything first with Pure UE, coming from a background of software engineering I find the trap of getting stuck in development instead of just being able to get good at level design.

You guys have made, in my humble opinion, one of the best, if not the best level design and time related gameplay mechanics. Not just the level design, the architectural design of Dunwall and Karnaca are superb. Many of us hate what Bethesda and Microsoft have done to you and I sincerely hope you guys get your rhythm back.

Im so happy i found your channel omg, what a fantastic video :)

Hey man! I've been trying and failing to build a finished 3-level game for years now, mainly due to lack of systems to design levels around, and lack of level design experience to know what systems are most important for prototyping. I saw this a few days ago and it inspired me to get into Hammer and Half-Life 2 mapping some 20 years after release (and something like 13 years after I first played it) and even though I only have 1, very basic level under my belt, it's been such a fun and rewarding experience compared to greyboxing for my games held together with elmer's glue and duct tape. Hopefully you'll do a part 4, or more videos around HL2. If not, thanks for the new hobby lol

great job.

Thank you for making one of my favorite games ever

cool In The Mood For Love poster in the background

Late following this up from your Reddit post: but holy smokes #6 was my question! Thanks so much, Steve! I really do think about this when I am doing Jindosh Mansion and Stilton's Manor because they are so much fun to play and replay. I always try to run them in a slightly different way than I've previously done....and that's the genesis of my question.

A great perspective! Thanks for sharing

SENSATIONAL 256 COLOR PALETTES AND 3D PERSPECTIVES

How is it that you say orthogonality lets you use less mechanics (which is obviously good) but then you ilustrate it with games which prove that these game would simply have less mechanics (and thus less scope) if were less orthogonal. So while I understand and totally agree that this is extremely important and fundamental concept to design, it's hard for me to get how a "non-orthogonal game" like this "bad left 4 dead with gun-armed bandits instead of different zombies" would have more mechanics than orthogonal game.

Someone only needs to ask themself the question if their level could be placed in a game and be fun. If ots just for show then its not really worthy of being in a game

Super cool to get insight into what all went in to making this movie!

Man, how do you talk about orthogonal game design without talking about Starcraft. That game is the poster child for it IMO.

I think I've heard this idea or something similar expressed as things that are additive versus things that are multiplicative. If you add an extra gun, that's additive because now you have two guns. If you add a teleport ability now, that's multiplicative. Because now you have all of these situations where you could have used the gun to solve the problem. And you have all of the situations where you could use the teleport to solve the problem. And you also have all of the situations where you could have used the teleport and the gun to solve the problem.

I miss the old arkane. Some of the best games ever made. Plenty of games that were decent that I have started and never finished. Dishonored and prey I played every last drop out of them. It seems to me the esg centric laws and push, are ruining the industry and once great studios. Maybe I'm wrong but it definitely feels like less and less games are being made by people who love games, and more by people who love money and have an agenda to push. Hopefully more gamers wake up so these companies can go under, and the market can produce companies run by people who love games again.

I think the next generation, and your generation that didn't realize they can be LD from the start (like me) have now turned to UGC engines, like Roblox, Minecraft and UEFN. From my experience, in UEFN, Epic Games provides 46k assets for free and allows anyone to publish a game with them within the Fortnite Ecosystem and even monetize. This uses Unreal Engine with provided assets that are all modular, on a grid and well-crafted, and it is LD/GD paradise. It also allows great prototyping because of the simple device system that you can set up gameplay with a few clicks (check my artstation for examples)

In all seriousness incredibly well explained video. Easy sub

Bro this video made me hella drunk i dont think im making shit

I hope Tom Francis next game is his version of a Metal Gear Solid. Peope are really tired of endless open worlds that they can never finish. It's so much more satisfying and rewarding to finish a smaller world over and over again by different means and discovering (more) secrets or finding a new way to reach the ending or beat a task. Especially when you find a way that doesn't feel like it's intended or that requires out of the box thinking. Metal Gear Solid was - and is - hugely popular and legendary. As is Half Life or Half Life 2. We really need those games with tight worlds and interesting stories again.

I like XCOM, but I also hate XCOM. I think the style and setting is really cool. I think the tactics and strategy are kinda cool. But I actually HATE the gameplay. Nothing makes me more mad than a 99% hit percent chance that results in a miss, because the game doesn't tell me actual numbers. I think that's something that is great about Into The Breach. But Into the Breach has no interesting story or setting.

Just recently found your channel and I've been loving the content. Thank you for all the insight and advice.

Deathloop. Played the whole game , then afterwards read somewhere that the enemies are supposedly different to one another. lol. Never felt it in gameplay.

I’m glad I followed at the right time it seems. I’ve never been too interested in coding but I’ve downloaded Unity, Godot, and Unreal to try to understand game design but it really does feel you say- building a game to design a level. The only thing I’ve got so far is a level I made in Alice2 (the pseudocode software not the game lol) for school and I fear that may end up being the only playable level I can figure out how to showcase. It’s certainly helpful to have the other skills to get to know game engines intimately but I genuinely don’t know if I can keep up.

Took de drinnnnnkin chaalleng N now cant tipe. Fancy forrrrr brilllllliantt vddeo x

Thank you so much for this video. It is so refreshing to see such a large repertoire and understanding how design can be radically different between games because they’re all their own thing, without taking sides about what a game should or shouldn’t be. I get a lot of mockery at work for being so much into MGS1 which has its flaws, but I’m still baffled at how modern and immersive it feels even nowadays. Also thank you for the references on the Orient Express game, as I’ve always wondered how a game can manage *inaction* instead of action-basically how to keep a story interesting even in the case of an antagonist and/or incompetent player. I never had a console for myself and had to parasite my friends to play stuff. I remember loving Ocarina of Time, MGS2 cereal box demo because my parents were antiwar, FF7, The Sims, then later on Death Stranding, Donut County, Journey, Outer Wilds, Inscryption, The Beginner’s Guide, Silent Hill 2. Now with some distance I can see that what catches me up in games is more of a tension between unexpected mechanics and personal rambling. This sort negative space is what SH2 and the MGS trilogy do super well. It is a space that is to me kind of close to reading in a way, were you have the freedom and intimacy to ramble in your thoughts but still have to make some cognitive effort to continue through the content. I came from contemporary art and landed into game making because I wanted to do immersive installations but the logistics were too crazy and I wanted people to be able to have a personal experience which isn’t really feasible in a museum. But games really can get there and also they’re more accessible as a cultural form than say Tate Modern. Really super appreciate how holistic your channel is. Gives a lot of ideas and a lot of actionable advice. Liked and subscribed!

This is a huge misalignment I’ve seen even in many indie projects that are carried on with like 500k of budget. Devs want to make dev, level designers also want to sort of dev, and the result is a mess where nobody understands what is going on, usually with multiple concurrent scripts or blueprints that cause a lot of bugs, and where touching the level design will affect the systems of the game, which should never happen. I started out as a technical artist, so more focused on VFX and stuff, but now I realise how important it is to have someone who is a tools programmer and keeps in the loop with the art and design parts of the teams. It doesn’t even require much techy techy knowledge, just a good ability to listen and identify use cases to create the methods that then will be used by designers in the editor. As to how to learn then level design without former dev experience, I find this very interesting since I never did it, every time I sort of coded my way through my design without worrying much, just trusting my knowledge in architecture and filmmaking. But I’m really interested in the comments here to discover actual level editors so I can also try them out and gather ideas for better toolsets, especially regarding games that are less narratively oriented. So happy to have discovered your channel, it is a great great resource! You are shared across our team <3

It makes sense. If you have different weapons for example in some shooting game and they're too similar - all shoot projectiles in a similar way - then even if their damage and looks are different, most players will just choose the strongest one they can and forget about the weaker weapon as there are no cases in which it'd be more useful. If their mechanics differ more, you may still want to use the "weaker" weapon if it allows you to hit an enemy that'd otherwise be out of reach, hit multiple foes at once, give the hit enemy a negative status like poison or stun, shoot out a hook into the wall to move , destroy obstacles... Then you still have reasons to use it. You actually have multiple weapons, not just one with different looks and damage.

Fellow designer (and video producer) here. I apologize ahead of time for my thought pool. I agree that this is such an important concept, though I haven't heard of this specific term before (which makes sense; as every game design book says, nobody can agree on terms). It seems like what you're talking about is variety and playstyles, or even I guess what players could devolve into "interesting" as opposed to "bland", or even opening up avenues for depth (can you tell that game design is a complex web? lol). Though partway through the video, you're just describing Depth, pure and simple. To me, this sounds like a type of complexity (which I define in my professional Cuphead DLC game design case studies as "# of game elements") where for each element you add, it must include higher value in depth (which I define as "the interaction between game elements"). If you're only adding a new enemy that has higher health, that can still provide good depth in a tightly designed game depending on the other existing elements (though, this means that the other elements have to pick up the slack, which shows the value of what you're talking about haha). Basically, I think this concept is a tool for justifying your complexity, as is the goal: If you're going to add an element into the game, make it as meaningful as possible and with as much depth as possible, so opening up design possibilities is certainly beneficial. Though when you mention "informed simplicity," that's just pure depth. Low complexity, high depth, which is the goal of game design. So I'm getting the feeling that the term can be a little all over the place, but honestly that's pretty typical of game design.

This is super informative, I recently played Children of the Sun and I didn't have a word for it then. But I liked how different the enemy types were, so that it made thinking about the level a lot more interesting, but now I know the word for it! It's such a cool concept and can really elevate a game to be so much more memorable and immersive :)

Indeed I believe that I kinda fell asleep at the end

Legend! You've worked on level design in a game which contains some of the best level design there is. Thank you for for contributing to one of the best immersive sim experiences 🙏.

Dude that idea about a DOtO level where your target is another Daud trainee is awesome, too bad we never saw it.

I'm surprised Chess wasn't mentioned. A good example tho is Desperados 3. The first game is amazing, but the 3rd one go rid of much of the overlap between the characters abilities.

"Independent design" is what use as a term. Orthogonal sounds too "mathy", and people not used to game dev find it harder to relate to (especially non english speakers). Just my two cents.

Why is the word "reasonable" at 18:20 in your subtitles spelled "reaaasonable"?

You know your game developers mean business when they start quoting Chekhov.

Thankyou for only showing footage of Dishonored 1 in this, as I actually haven't had the chance to play D2 yet (altho I do own it and it's on my list. D1 is one of my all-time faves and D2 looks/sounds really good) Found your channel from the orthogonal design video, and you have a really great way of putting things, along with obviously some really good insight ^.^ I'll have to keep a special eye on what you mentioned here when I play through D2.

Did you see Ghost of Dunwall and Ghost of Karnaka videos? No powers, no kills, no detection, no knockouts? The fact that you and the team designed the game to make this possible blows my mind.

Hey Steve. I spent a lot of time in Dishonored 2. It's interesting to see the face of the person who created the spaces I explored. Edge of the World was a memorable level. Seamless indoor-outdoor transitions (AC Unity), Rooftops (love traversal on roofs) Sunny... Clockwork Mansion must've been difficult. Do you enjoy the 3Dness of Dishonored 2's level design? Must've been quite challenging to consider and incorporate Dishonored's playstyle elements into the level. I.e. Blink, jumping distance. PS. I like the idea of easter-eggs in levels (Q. 7) like a "How did you get here?"

Re: time travel levels. Older games have done this plenty, like Link to the Past. Or recent metroidvanias, like Guacamelee. Everyone’s building on top of everyone else!

Ah finally more information about Orthogonal design, thanks! After watching this, I realized that I have always applied it to my enemy design but never thought about applying it to levels.

Good and useful advice! Now only one deeper question remains: is it really a good industry to invest time in?

Is there a reason dishonored two guards don't ask to gather for whisky and cigars?

Make dark messiah open world elders scroll like version but better