Game Design Meetup #6 — Level Design Rules

Ricky Abu Siddek and I hosted the sixth meetup at Game Town, with Tim Spaninks giving the talk. 117 people signed up and another 50 sat on the waitlist, which is the largest room we've had. It was also our first sponsored evening: CDG Booster covered it, so there was pizza.

Tim gave us a condensed version of the hour he's presenting at Northern Game Summit in Finland next week. He has been building levels since the early 2000s, across six shipped games and eight countries: Critical Ops at the studio he co-founded, then Chorus and Dead Island 2, Star Wars Outlaws at Ubisoft Annecy, and ARC Raiders at Embark, where we were colleagues until he left at the end of July to make level design videos full time. That many teams gives you a view of what designers everywhere quietly agree on.

His argument was that most of our rules are borrowed from outside games. Flow state comes from positive psychology, our colour language from colour psychology, our metrics from ergonomics. Each one exists for a good reason, and each one is more interesting the moment a game breaks it on purpose. Elden Ring drops a boss on you in the first five minutes that is meant to kill you, which teaches you faster than any tutorial pop-up that death is cheap here and that some enemies are for later.

The colour section was the one I keep chewing on. Yellow paint on a climbable ledge works, and it has been used so widely that players now read it instantly. But once players notice the pattern they notice the designer behind it, and the wall goes up. Peak drops the signposting almost entirely, and gets away with it because working out where you can climb is the game rather than the thing standing between you and the game. Know which one you're building before you decide.

He was generous with his own work, including a spot in Stella Montis in ARC Raiders, a map he owned. A vent opening drifted during art passes and landed just above a normal jump, exactly the awkward threshold his rules say to avoid. Teammates asked whether it was intentional and liked that it wasn't obvious, so he left it in. On Outlaws he broke the studio rule against long unbroken climbs for the tower into Sliro's mansion. Kay and Nix get a last look at Canto Bight from an angle they have never seen, and he kept the player in control rather than cutting to a cutscene, so they take it in themselves. The climb asks nothing of you so you can breathe before the stealth and combat waiting inside.

He closed on Picasso: learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. He's making level design videos full time now, so if this is the kind of thing you want more of, his channel is TimDoesLevelDesign.