[MUSIC]
Okay.
I talked a bit about the difference between game design and level design, but
I want to talk about the kinds of components,
the things that go into designing a level.
Because, the truth is there are quite a few things that go into it, right?
You have action, exploration, puzzle solving, storytelling and
the overall aesthetics.
These are important things to pay attention to as you start to think about,
well how am I going to design a level, what kinds of things go into my levels?
Let's talk about action, which is one of our components of level design, right?
Well, it's important that the type of action that a level contains is
compatible with the rest of a game.
And sometimes, you can add types of action that add variety,
but sometimes it detracts.
So if a game is primarily about running around shooting things and
blowing stuff up, suddenly adding in a level that's about being sneaky and
quiet can be really confusing or daunting for
a player, which isn't to say that lots of games don't do that.
They do, but it's not always a good decision, all right?
So we also need to think about how much action a level contains,
because If there's too much, you can have player fatigue.
Maybe they can't get enough done.
I know personally, as somebody that has two small children,
levels that take hours for me to complete are really difficult,
because finding hours in my days are really difficult.
And if I'm playing for an hour and my kid unplugs the controller or
does something interesting, I don't want to lose all of that time and possibility.
And so, that's an important element of your level design.
How much time it's going to take, right, which is also related to pacing, right?
Like how quickly, how rapidly are things introduced to the player?
How much attention do they have to pay, right?
Because that is important, right?
Like it's different.
Some games are very actively paced, right?
That the player must react very quickly.
But they can only sustain that kind of attention for a given amount of time.