Say orthogonal again, say orthogonal again I dare you, i double dare you m&thafacka say orthogonal one more godamn time!

nice vid, you said you had one month to complete this map, now my question is, how long did it take for each one of the stages? i mean, planning, making the layout, correcting, rebalancing, final details

challenge accepted

I also played around with DoomCAD when I was around 12 years old. I’ve since gone down a different creative path in life… recently I got into Hammer 5.x. Never too late to design a level 😅

I've had this in my watch later for a long time and I've been robbing myself of watching this video. THANK YOU SO MUCH edit: im putting it back in my watch later as a treat for future me

Great video Steve! There is something to be said about orthogonal design often increasing the scope of a game but I think non-orthogonal design has the potential to be an even bigger waste of time. Sure, if you put orthogonal designs next to non-orthogonal designs and ask “which would take longer to implement?” the non-orthogonal design would often win. But when the question becomes: “which takes longer to make fun?”, in my experience, it flips and sometimes it is not even possible to get good results with non-orthogonal design. And thus increasing the scope more than an orthogonal design would or leaving you stuck with a un-fun game.

it’s almost 2025, still isn’t a part 4(( I wish Santa will get my letter and this year we’ll get a new part))

It would be cool to see a professional level designer like you analyze modern Doom 2 mapsets like Eviternity or Valiant. The amount of mileage people have been able to squeeze out of the revenant enemy alone is simply amazing.

Why not create a few game genre replicas so people can use as a beginning to build levels on unity and sell them on unity asset store, or your own? You can replicate a platformer, and fps, rpg and so on, allow to tweak some settings and people can just buy it and practice level design. If they get used a lot, it would be great for the industry because they would be comparable between each other

Is it OK to change the experience and the desired mechanics while working on the level so that the previous LD document becomes no longer actual?

I will disagree with Xcom. While they're not super orthogonal, the player classes are somewhat orthogonal. The ranger, for instance, is super close up and is generally played as a run and gun full movement flanker. But you can also play it as a full melee character. The support, I forget the class name, can be a solid shooter but can be played entirely as a support, especially in xcom2 with the gremlin mechanic. Or we can to the heavy that is either played as the last to act unit for massive damage or used as a tank with support setup for other characters. I think there's enough variation there to say there's orthogonal design there.

You see this a ton in tower defense where if it was just about upgrading the tower, you would have no game what soever. Instead different types of enemies force you to make decisions when building a type of tower in order to strategize your way forward and this is the heart of tower defense. How to counter your enemy, tower type and tower placement. Love it, great points.

So specific features to fit specific needs, in other words giving a problem solving system through your choice of gear.

Actualy some decent advice.. Finaly

This makes me think of a design philosophy I came up with while playing games and thinking about their design. Let's say you can make 10 things. You can have 9 characters and 1 weapon, 1 character and 9 weapons, or any split in between. Now, both of those extremes sound both boring and overwhelming. But what if you had 5 characters and 5 weapons? Both of these numbers are easily digestible; I can wrap my head around cross-comparing 5 characters or weapons or levels. This also maximizes the potential possibilities. With this design philosophy, the players aren't overwhelmed by hundreds of characters to choose from, or bored with the same three levels and game modes.

14:27 One thing I've always hated about this segment is that the game essentially tells you what to do. It's somewhat obvious what the outcomes will be for each option, and instead of thinking of a solution yourself, you answer a multiple choice question. Physically switching the glasses would have been super cool, considering you can already slash the glasses with your knife to spill them or walk away, it would have made for a more immersive experience just slightly outside the limitations of the game (and less obvious to new players).

learn a lot~ by the way, what's the font, looks comfortable.

Epic

Hello Steve, I have a simple questions (or maybe not so simple). After watching a lot of your videos and those of others, can you please explain - what makes a "good" level or map? There has to be a formula of sorts or a set of criteria that a professional like you follows to make a "good" level. So, what is that? How does someone that is getting started and can't land a job at one of the major game studios, come to understand what makes a good level? Is it more puzzles, exploration, quests, or more what..? There has to be a way this can be learned other than working for a major studio. So, how can someone starting out do that? - I know I can simply build more and more levels, sure... but how do I know if I'm going down the right path? How do I know if I'm not just learning the wrong things and getting better at doing it wrong. Any thoughts?

Great great video, thank you.

Thanks! Great

D2 my all time favorite Dishonored title and one of the best (if not the best) stealth based game for me. Loved everything about it, played it 4 or 5 times since release, and still playing it and finding new ways to have fun around. Level design was just great, and it looks incredible at 5120x2160. Too bad Arkane will never deliver D3. By the way, i would love a video about Deathloop level design, since there's many similarities with Dishonored.

Very interesting, nice way to visualize how to make levels from a gameplay pov. I have seen mappers doing the mistake of making a nice looking environment and then trying to put gameplay into it, while this series demonstrated nicely how to go from concepts/ideas to a small rudimentary but playable version. Also made me realize how much time goes into all this stuff.

As someone who also provides detailed feedback, I love the process of going step by step like you did! I sometimes do the same thing but then I realize the video is 5 hours long haha. Love it.

Alba is a terrific game. I sent this to my friend Scott Rogers who gave the Disneyland level design talk at GDC. He'll love hearing that he inspired you. I'll also be sharing this with my level design students since they always seem to be creating empty sprawl despite my pleas for them to create smaller, more interactively dense spaces.

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.