What are the critical ingredients for good level design?

[DinnerX]

^And if I want to hop around like mad man with total disregard for the rings I still can. That's the way it should be. Have an obvious path for beginners but don't tie people to that path.

[Luke]

Put me in the group who enjoys multiple paths to reach the same goal. It's not a necessity, but I do enjoy "exploring" games such as Sonic 2.

[Ivo]

See, I see those as properly done level design. For example, take a Sonic game. Initially you'll have a couple of sets of rings in the air that you grab. Rings are good, so you get in the habit of aiming your movement towards rings. Now that the hook is in you the level designers use the rings to pull you into the right direction. It's them subtly leading you rather than dragging you with a leash.

Agreed, and particularly then they can use the rings to hint of a secret or a short-cut and so one. Exploring huge worlds to find a few secrets without hints is generally more work than fun and therefore not good design. I know I plug his articles often, but this is something that David Sirlin as written good stuff about. I suggest checking his article about the secrets of DKC2:
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/the-secr ... try-2.html

Ivo.

[Erik_Twice]

I don't think level design is a buzzword, at the end of the day, nobody seems to care about it, sadly.

Anyways, to me asking what are the critical ingredients for good level design is simply a bad questions, it's too broad! It's asking to asking what makes a good movie or a good painting.

I would say that level design is a way to force the player to explore the mechanics offered by the game but that would also be very limited in scope.

I agree that you almost never see any comments beyond "it has good level design" but there's a reason for that: It's incredibly hard to describe in words which is why my Doom review is so bad. How do you explain the enemy placement in Castlevania or the carefully measured-curves of Out Run? It's so hard it's easier to just tell people to play the game themselves and I won't consider myself a decent critic until I manage to do it well.

[johnnyonthespot]

I'd like to bring up the idea of back tracking.

I think games like Metroid did back tracking well. You'd be in one certain area and come to a part of the level that you can't continue either because you don't have the right weapon or the right ability. When you further progress through the game and are able to obtain that item or ability, the level design shows you how to use it first thing. Then once you figure it out, you remember that a few stages back you ran into the same sort of issue and now you know how to overcome that. It leads the player into thinking you are figuring out the structure to the game. That's what has the player coming back for more.

One game that I bring up time and time again of having poor level design is Halo. There were at least three or four stages that were exactly the same. By placing a different number of enemies in the stage the second time around doesn't make it a different level. It becomes repetitive and I lose interest quickly. I always have said that Halo was a programmer's dream game. How many weapons can you hold? Well Doom has about ten. Screw it: you can only hold two. Next? Different characters with different abilities to choose from? Nah. Just one. We can change the color of them though. Are we done? All right, sell it.

[GameMasterGuy]

Don't forget the low number of usable weapons in the original, along with the lack of equipment and a health system that lets level designers derp on where to put health packs as much as they want.

[J T]

I don't think this is necessary for good level design in all types of games, but one thing I like to see in level design is environments that push you to fully explore the mechanics of the gameplay, particularly when there is simply gameplay. The game that immediately comes to mind for me in this regard is VVVVVV. You can only move left and right. There is no jumping, but you can flip gravity to go in the opposite direction. The controls are incredibly simple. All of the complexity of that game lies in the level design. The environments provide you with a series of increasingly difficult challenges that continue to challenge you to use the same simple mechanic in new ways. This is also broken up into small manageable chunks with checkpoints in between.

[Godot102]

Being able to play through the levels upside down(Symphony of the night). Another instance of clever level design was in sonic CD where the levels were built around the player being able to warp literally anywhere in the level.

The way I see it levels NEED to be able to complement the game's physics properly. For example one of my main problems with 3d Sonics is that the controls at times, feel slippery, this would be fine except that many levels in 3d sonic games seem to feature countless gaps and pitfalls resulting in many cheap deaths.