One of the feelings that I think games are especially good at evoking is the fear of getting lost. The idea that you’ve made one to many wrong turns, and now you don’t know how to find your way back.  Because of games ability to let the player explore a gameworld, they are in a unique position to make the player feel lost, and create an emotional experience around that feeling.

This was one of the things I found most engaging about Minecraft. You could explore in any direction, come across a cave, find it just keeps going down, and become very concerned that you won’t be able to find your way back to your home base with all the new resources you’ve collected. You start getting this very interesting mental tension between exploring further when you see a new interesting area up ahead, or turning back to avoid getting further lost or killed by some cave monster.

Minecraft conveys this feeling so effectively with a combination of a few elements. First of all, when you die, you lose your inventory and go back to a spawn point which could be a long distance from where you died. It also has no in-game map that you can follow to find your way back home. Finally, it has very interesting procedurally-generated areas which warrant exploration, and which can go on and on, drawing you deeper and deeper in.

The other element, which is a little more common, is not just having a lot of space that the player can get lost in, but allowing them to do so. As I said in the post on Leveling Systems, many games will put up barriers to the player progressing to new areas until they’ve accomplished something in the current area, or gained some new power. This is very useful to act as a guiding hand to the player, letting them get familiar with an area before moving them onto the next area, but you can’t have the feeling of being lost if the game doesn’t let you get lost in the first place.

Ultima Underworld was a good example of a game that didn’t put up roadblocks. There were many times in the game where I’d find the stairs leading down to the next level before doing much of importance on the level I was currently on. I would usually descend the stairs out of curiosity, but have this vague feeling of dread exploring the next stage, feeling like I wasn’t supposed to be there yet. Even though there’s an in-game map, it felt like I had gotten lost, and made for a very interesting game experience. You really felt like the caves you were exploring were vast and labyrinthine, because the game didn’t wait until you were familiar with your current area before allowing you to venture into the next area.

The other part of the equation is giving the player many paths that they can take. It’s hard to get lost in a linear experience, but if you allow the player options in where to go, it plants the idea in their mind that they either chose the wrong path, or progressed too soon. This is amplified, then, when you can’t turn back. This could be for physical reasons, for example, if you fall down a pit and have to find a different way back up, or for implicit reasons, such as not remembering which way you came.

The recent game Antichamber did a good job of making the player feel lost with it’s constantly shifting geometries. You could very easily go the wrong way, and turn around to see that the passageway you came through is now gone. This feeling was especially strong early on in the game before I started relying on the map system to get around more easily. It’s also interesting to note that, if you do everything right, you can conceivably never see at least 80% of the game, because so many of the stranger rooms are places you only go if you’ve messed something up, gotten lost, or missed an efficient way to do something. Part of the fun in the game was to just keep exploring deeper and deeper while getting progressively more lost.

And here we find the other side to getting lost: the joy of finding some interesting landmark after wandering around lost. Going back to the Minecraft example, say you explore deep enough in that dangerous cave to find a wealth of rare resources. Suddenly the anxiety of getting lost pays off, and a new pressure is added to the player to return safely back home with their loot.

I worry that with modern gaming, both mainstream and indie, focusing more on providing a guided and paced experience, we miss out on creating an experience which I believe games can deliver better than any other medium. The feeling of getting lost, and the dread and wonder it can produce.

When designing a game, there’s always that question of “when should I start designing levels?” This is something I’ve had to deal with a lot, since level design is my favorite part of the development process. When I was getting my bearings as a designer, I tended to jump the gun on Level Design. I’d get the basic mechanics in, get a couple enemies in and then churn out a bunch of levels. The problem was, after a while, I’d run out of ideas for levels, and just start making boring spaces with enemies scattered around to fill up space.

I’d lost track of what the point of level design is, and it made me realize something. I realized that what makes designing a level fun and interesting is the same thing that makes playing a level fun and engaging. I have the most fun designing levels when I can throw in a new enemy or obstacle, combine enemies and obstacles in ways that I haven’t done before, when I can lay out a precise way to lead to a certain type of challenge, and when I can arrange a level for interesting navigation.

If you start designing levels to soon in the process, you’ll run into the issue of not having enough content (enemies, obstacles, items, ect…) to combine into interesting encounters. You won’t be having fun, since you’ll be designing small variations on the same set of encounters, and the player won’t be having fun because they are playing small variations on the same set of encounters.

What I’ve found to be helpful is to write down brief descriptions and diagrams of my level designs as I’m working on designing game objects. That way, I get a sense of how many enemies and what sorts of obstacles I need. And then once I do design the actual levels, I’ve got a clear goal to accomplish for each area. And that goal is going to parallel what the player’s goal in that area is. “Introduce Large Melee Enemies” becomes “Learn to fight Large Melee Enemies”, “Show the player an important item somewhere out of reach” becomes “figure out how to reach the important item” and “Create a series of traps that require excellent timing to get through” becomes…well, you get the picture.

So, remember, if you’re not having fun designing the levels, the player probably won’t have fun playing them. This means making enough mechanics and content to fill the amount of levels you want with interesting combinations of challenges.

I wanted to go in depth with a set of mechanics known as Leveling Systems. I feel that Leveling systems are one of the more misunderstood game dynamics, and I think that misunderstanding derives from the belief that, in a leveling-based game, the game character gains in skill over time instead of the player having to gain skill. I’d like to go into what makes this a poor way to think about leveling systems, and also what I think well-done leveling systems accomplish in a game, but let’s figure out exactly what a leveling system entails.

The basic idea of a Leveling System comes from table-top role-playing games, where completing encounters would award your character experience points. Get enough experience points and you “Level Up”, giving boosts to your stats and access to new abilities. Many games, particularly RPGs, use a similar system of experience and levels. But I think an even broader definition of leveling systems would include any system by which the character’s capabilities improve by performing in-game actions. The Metroid games would be an example of a leveling system that doesn’t use experience points. Instead, you find items around the game-world that impart new abilities and increase your total health and missile capacity.

So it’s easy to see how the misconception that leveling systems are designed to move the stress of improvement from the player to the character. After all, character improvement is the metaphor presented for the mechanics. However, a closer analysis reveals that leveling systems can serve a variety of purposes.

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When I released Venusian Vengeance, one of the complaints I got was about the length. The game only took a few hours to beat, they said. There are two reasons that the game is the length it is. One is that I tried very hard to avoid filler. Pretty much every part of the game serves some purpose or brings something new to the table. When I had the game’s 10 levels completed, I thought about lengthening the game, inserting new levels in, but I decided that I was happy with the flow and arc of the game as it was, and didn’t want to interfere with that. The second reason is simple. I like short games.

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Games have something of an identity crisis going on. I can’t count how many design discussions I’ve seen where the subject is what games are supposed to be. Are games art? Are games a storytelling medium? Should games be all about the mechanics? Should games be all about creating a gameworld? Are games mature enough? Should games be a cinematic experience? Should games be linear? Does Game X represent everything that’s wrong with gaming today? Is there anything wrong with gaming today? Would the ultimate expression of games as an art-form look more like Civilization, Super Mario World or Journey?

When you get down to it, don’t quite know what they are yet, or what they are capable of.

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