Level design

I can't stand the fact that I have to waste my time using an archive service every time I want to link to a fucking website here

Here are working links

archive.is/fKptv
archive.is/BdsPD

I just want to talk about video games, not everybody gives a shit about GG wanting to cuck sites out of their advertising renvue or whatever

The linear canyon? That's what you consider top tier?

also there is a video there John Romero he talks about level design, especially in doom. cant be bothered to find it. for what I remember he talks about making the very first level last, because then you have learned good level design for you game

it was. apart from the one copter, it was lacking hitscan enemies and constant flow of enemies. It was going forwards smoothly with constant action, apart from the earlier levels

But that's all in enemy placement. Strip that away and all you have is a corridor.

so what? it was the most fun level. even if it was a corridor, it was the only level that fully utilized the action that serious sam has to offer

...

It's called archiving them, you newfag cuck.

...

oh it was just bait. you dont even offer an argument

Hello OP. I have made maps for cs, l4d, portal. I also started a bunch of shitty ones for hl2 and natural selection 1 that I never finished because I was young. My favorite was making maps for portal, because it was puzzle design in the levels, and I got great feedback some friends. I didn't go back and finish them with art passes, I basically just made simple designs, got feedback from friends, and improved upon them.

Clarifying multiplayer FPS design I suppose is important, so I will offer what tips I can.

The most important lesson in hammer was applying "nodraw" to surfaces you don't see so that you don't slam everyones frame rates into the ground, and make sure the level is sealed to prevent leaks when you compile the map.

For hammer, I used to go to ww w.interlopers.net/ for all my learning, although I'm sure youtube and other forums are probably more popular nowadays.

First, playing the game you want to build levels for is important for understanding flow and balance. In a game like CS, for instance, you need to know how many seconds it will take for terrorist to run from spawn point -> point A and where the typical "action" will happen at if both teams rush, for instance. Dust 2 usually has a short-range option, and long range options, and multiple lanes of attack where those get flipped at some points and you might need to flash or smoke in to an area to make any progress if your entire team has smg's and shotguns. CS is usually a series of 1v1's at corners, very few players actually use teamwork to, for instance, peak a known sniper location at the same time from two directions.

In left 4 dead, I noticed there was a certain map where often an entire team of survivors would get wiped when coming out of the spawn doors due to the design of the starting door. One lane, and the initial setup of special infected (in multiplayer) could usually absolutely rape them the moment they came out. Why? The door opened to a narrow alley. The survivors had one chokepoint to go through. A boomer could hide on the roof right above spawn doors, or on an opposite roof, slightly higher. The narrow corridor meant hunters and smokers could come from any direction. The narrow "trench" that the survivors were in was a nightmare to get through, and then they'd have hordes of common infected to shoot through, in order to move very little. There was no nearby "corner" to hide in, to give them an advantage, they had common infected coming at them from 180 degrees on both sides, instead of in a nice easily viewable, spammable melee, corner.

Obviously if you build a gigantic map that isn't to scale, it's going to be a sniper fest, there's going to be no shortrange options, it will be unbalanced.

People don't like much verticality. It might seem like a great new idea, but it's been tried and failed many times when you add too much verticallity to a level. Keep it at 2 floors max, unless you're making rainbow six siege, and you have only one center building and multiple stairwells. It's ok if you want to have edges or pits to fall into on the edge, or be able to environmentally kill people, but some people just get really pissed off about it and will hate your map if it's too gimmicky.

People also hate water. Avoid making water.

Make a simple design first, playtest it, it is easy to go back and rip up entire sections. If you take time to make a super detailed area, and then find out that the flow of the map sucks and is unbalanced, you can't easily make it all fit together, if you have all of this cluttered art and objects and details getting in the way.

You're the one who abandoned defending the level and went for the fun fallacy. You beat yourself

Just fucking practice with something easy to make a map for with tons of flexibility, like Doom. Or read various dev notes on why they designed certain things the way they did, and read what map makers have to say on the maps they made and all the scathing remarks they have for amateur work.

Set yourself up to fail and don't make your dream project as your first game.

Use an old engine and fold the room into itself to fuck with the player like Marathon's maps.

Word filter for GG blacklisted websites, try finding better sources or memorize the ones Holla Forums has blacklisted from GG. Just because most Newfags don't care or ever touch GG generals doesn't mean it still isn't a thing.

The design of a level needs to compliment the gameplay of the game. A level that is good in one game may end up being horrible when used in another. Make a level with features that you think would compliment the gameplay stye of your game, playtest it, then revise. Just keep repeating that until you're satisfied with it, then start detailing and optimizing it until it looks nice as well.

Because you're autistic

This is good advice. I was just starting to think about blood gulch, remembering it was very popular, and of course would not apply to anything related to CS at all.

...

I'm aware>>11130989

Sure, but my point is this isn't /gg/, it's Holla Forums. The people who care will use Archive.is anyways, the ones that don't won't wanna have to spoend extra time doing it

I wasn't talking to you, left that reply in by accident.

The Holla Forums that founded GG and left 4chan, the same Holla Forums that still houses GG (note generals), and those sites are blacklisted for a reason. Get better sources.

can 4ch just leave?
if you want to provoke discussion, good. how you do it matters. right now you are just shitposting.

if you are serious then you are a fucking idiot and should keep to lurking. I literally told you why the oh-no-all-corridor-levels-are-horrible-period level in SS3 was fun

Please leave, reddit.

I don't know why you keep saying sources when what I was linking was a podcast and livestream that IGN did. It's not something any other site has because it's not a news story.

Except you didn't. Why don't you go back to Call of Duty if you love narrow paths with no exploration so much?

The thing about level design is understanding what you are attempting to accomplish in a scene. If you are working in a game that has a narrative focus, you incorporate that. If the purpose is solely for gameplay, then that becomes important.

Consider Unreal versus Unreal Tournament. For a game that has a story, you have a degree of progression to weapons and a somewhat more logical placement of them in the game world. If you have an arena shooter, on the other hand, it matters more about how you place them relative to each other. After all, you don't want to stick all of the good shit in the center. You can also afford to have everything on the same small map, instead of scattering a handpicked set on a level.

When a game comes about like Myst that is more about puzzle elements, then you have to have a much stronger degree of internal logical consistency. When you have a tutorial level, you want to showcase as much as you can about the game in one go - or alternatively showcase only the basics, and force the player to acquire things as they play throughout the whole game.

Consider Guild Wars. In the Prophecies campaign, the entire Pre-Searing segment is an extended tutorial for learning how to play the PvE aspect of the game, and everything which follows is an extended tutorial for PvP, slowly introducing you to game mechanics such as attacking, then skills, then henchmen, then elite skills, and so on. The entire campaign is meant to showcase different PvP styles and aspects of PvP, especially the Crystal Desert. Factions has only a limited amount of tutorial as it expects older players. Nightfall has a very short and condensed tutorial that feels less organic. PvP-only drops a story facade altogether and essentially tosses the manual at you.

The setting can also be used to convey mood. Lighting tells a lot about the level that you're in, as does the use of color. The actual shape of objects and background appearance severely alter things. In short: the level design is very holistic.

...

...

just think of situations which make interesting and different uses of the gameplay, and then tie all those situations up in a coherent manner
just like make level

use real life for inspiration

fine tune for gameplay

????

profit

Play Super Mario Bros 3, Castlevania III (US version), and Duke 3D.

...

...

Play Paladins instead. It's basically FTP Overwatch without auto-aim and every map has at least 1, usually 2, dedicated flank route to every position.

Overwatch is cluttered because all the maps are too small and there LANES like in ASSFAGGOTS. It's cancer with genjimainins being the new scoutmaining. Give up, user.

That's the point lol

It's a team oriented game.

the worst part of bad maps in overwatch isn't that there isn't an option to turn them off, it's that I know that blizzard is too far up their asses to even bother considering disallowing queuing for certain maps or custom maps

But user, Hi-Rez.

But Overwatch doesn't have auto aim

the level design may be better in Paladins, it is a worse game.
I say try it, but you probably will get bored when the game FORCES you to play against bots for an hour before you can play against real players.

Are you new or do you not know what IDs are?

We've just had an user spout the lane meme. It's safe to say this thread is too far gone.

So is Halo, Splatoon, COD, and TF2 but they all had better maps with flanking routes to every point of interest

Source still doesn't have auto culling?

Well I'm curious to what your idea of a good flanking route is. Could you name an example of one in TF2?

Go back to 4chan then if you're so fucking lazy. Stop demanding the board culture and rules change for your newfag normalfaggot ass.

It's gotta flow well above all else. Players should be able to move through the map constantly and keep momentum. It should be sorta fun to just run and hop through, in a way.

If you have pickups, make sure there's an acceptable level of risk in grabbing them, but maybe nothing too excessive. To look at quake, you have aerowalk. The red armor in aerowalk is in an alcove above some stairs that's hard to reach if you don't know the movement. In addition to that, it's in a little alcove that's easy to spam with rockets, so there is risk to it, you can't just waltz in willy-nilly and take it. However, getting caught by your opponent in there isn't a death sentence; you can drop down onto them or jump across Contrast with the red armor in cpm24, which is more tucked away in a dead end, which is easy to spam with splash damage, and the only way out is past the guy. That's a fucking deathtrap right there. Some people might like deathtraps like that, personally I'm not quite that much of a masochist.

Basically make sure strong items are in positions that are contestable by those out of control, and above all else make sure the map has good flow. I recommend looking at some of the popular dueling maps in reflex, most of them are pretty fun to play on.

I don't know, probably not, I havn't mapped in years and I havn't worked with other engines

I think to some degree, it does. It will auto seperate things a few hallways away, and there are tricks you can set up to fine tune it, but it would still render stuff on the opposite side of the brush.

Auto anything sounds kinda bad tbh, I still notice shit like this in other games like doom where you can see "into the void" so to speak, on surfaces that should have textures.

Monte Grippa on BF1 has a room near C where if you are standing on one side looking out into the tunnel, tons of the stuff on the other side doesn't render.

Old engines can't do that and the void you speak of is in all those old games.

*By "can't do that" I mean they can't just have textures at the other end which is why that void exists. If they could've fixed it they would.