As a larger sequel to horizon 2: The Desperate West, the already massive Horizon: Dawn of Zero, any part of this huge open world was designed to involve the ability to intersect with other game elements.
This problem becomes even more challenging when building major levels that connect much of the game's story. At GDC2022, Blake Rebouche, senior mission designer at Guerrilla Games, took a breakdown of the "Death's Door" mission, an early major level that moves the plot forward and takes on the role of introducing players to many of the game's key mechanics.
Death's Gate took years to complete and is constantly influenced by design improvements in different departments. Here's a brief look at how Rebouche and his colleagues tackled all of these cross-design challenges. Some of his solutions might help your team develop the next big game.
Rebouche began developing after the narrative team and creative director finalized the core narrative of Death's Gate. From the beginning to the end, the idea of the level is basically complete.
The protagonist, Aloy, enters a huge bunker and looks for a backup copy of the AI called Gaia. She travels through the office used by gaia's creators, restoring artificial intelligence, but is then attacked by a new set of futuristic villains and new machine enemies. She flees the bunker, using a new underwater stealth mechanism to avoid being caught.
For experienced people, Rebouche's level design process looks familiar. First, he and his team sketched out a prototype of a piece of paper. They then sketch out a framed version of the level to flesh out the gameplay concept. After that, the "first playable" version of the quest is assembled and ready to receive feedback from the game's test. Then there is a lengthy iterative and parallel development process until the release.
Rebouche says Deathgate's top goals are built on lessons learned from working in bunkers in Horizon: Dawn of Zero. The development team wanted to build a story-rich environment, reduce battles with human enemies (which was rated very negative in the previous game), and reduce art/lighting costs.
Rebouche even before creating a paper prototype, he made a list of nodes based on the given narrative direction and detailed which game elements he wanted to create to emphasize the narrative goals of the level.
When showcasing a graybox version of Death's Gate at GDC, Rebouche explained that at this stage, the level design team deliberately painted bright colors on the paths and objects needed to complete the task. Because the level doesn't have art assets ready at this stage, marking key features in vivid colors helps the team understand the flow of the level.
While parsing the process, Rebouche also began writing "talk-to-talk" conversational prompts for Aloy that were passed back to the narrative team for iteration. Rebouche points out that this is by no means a narrative dialogue, but rather a way to help the player through certain puzzles.
One of the challenges the level design team faced while developing Death's Gate was that the Ghost (a new machine enemy brought by the game's villain) took years to complete during production. Although they do not fight enemies in this area, they will keep track of the player.
Rebouche didn't care, "In the first game, I used lasers on the faces of human enemies. These silly-looking thugs would spend years tracking the area until the ghosts were designed. ”
From the prototype of the framework to the "first playable" version, Rebouche proposed many changes to what the level eventually encountered. After recovering Gaia from a spider-like computer machine, Aloy is attacked by an invincible opponent and overcomes the spider by tearing its legs off the wall and pushing them to the ground.
The game tests taken in the first playable level illustrate the early days of this program. The first prototype of all attacking spiders locks the player's attention on this big machine, which means they don't interact with the boss.
Rebouche tries to solve this problem by moving the tear point to a nearby wall, which works, but over time he realizes that the player doesn't have any chance to interact with this unique creation.
Pulling down the spider's limbs requires the use of Pullcaster (Note: a new tool introduced in the first hour of the game that allows the player to grab or pull an object towards themselves). Using Pullcaster to solve puzzles became the focus of Death's Gate, but further game testing illustrates a problem that open-world designers may be familiar with: Players sometimes forget how to use the tool, even though it's been on their list for hours.
This is because in open-world games, players may have been playing for hours without using the tool. Here, Rebouche shares one of the new golden rules of his level design: "The Golden Idea."
The "nuggets" in rebouche's vocabulary refer to small "instructional" moments that help players remember how to use game mechanics. Rebouche returns to the beginning of the level, adding these "golden ideas" to many of the tools that appeared during development, including the Shield Glider.
He credits the idea of "Golden Idea" to one of his colleagues who joined the team from Eidos Montreal. One of the implemented puzzles is the "Charging Spear" system, which later evolved into an electrical puzzle in which the player had to charge the empty battery and pull objects into place in order to carry them through the water to a container.
The puzzle acts as the "golden idea" for the tractor movement and charging system, but the space it places is dramatically reshaped by what happens next.
The power puzzle is located in an area of Death's Gate, which Rebouche calls the "underwater lab." For a long time, it was anchored around underwater navigation, and it felt like a "cave dive" in this tech-filled bunker.
It was cut down for two reasons. First, Rebouche received instructions from a higher level that they wanted more of the Pullcaster and Shield Glider content.
Aloy uses a shield-wing glider
Second, the underwater level environment in this space was so poorly evaluated by game testers that Rebouche's level fragments were used in internal files to illustrate how not to travel underwater.
Rebouche's design space is also influenced by other art and design departments that complete assets or mechanisms and insert them into the area. Channels were stretched and contracted, shuttle tools were added, and players who participated in the game's tests told the team they didn't know what to do next.
This iteration helped Rebouche solve the above problems with spider bosses. Technical artists and other designers come in and create unique objects on spider-shaped machines that can move around in space.
Rebouche says this effectively restores the entire boss battle to a state close to its original prototype, where players ignore bosses for the sake of the machine. But because of the Boss's AI improvements and the dynamic motion of the machine-fired section, it's combined in an unusual way.
Rebouche notes that this is a bit unusual, as most design iterations move developers away from flawed prototypes and toward fun interactions. But here, the flawed prototype has the skeleton of the "right" encounter ... If there are no other sectors, they are less obvious.
The underwater stealth portion of the level eventually gained enough attention as the ghost's design was completed and added to the level. Although most of the level's underwater shuttle content has been cut, Rebouche has preserved a very useful trick here.
The oxygen meter used by players to travel underwater allows them to stay underwater for a period of time. By adjusting the length of the passage to match the maximum level of the oxygen meter, the player has to surface in a room full of ghosts to breathe, which is a good tool to ensure that new creatures have time to be noticed.
By the time Death's Gate was ready to be released, it had gone through so much evolution, even though the pace of the story it conveyed remained the same. Looking back on the entire process, Rebouche says he appreciates the consistency of the level story, the early prototypes of the level are readable and representative, and his team can make a good transition when the game makes large design changes.
Given that many of the cut ideas also appear elsewhere in Horizon 2: Desperate for the West, Rebouche ended his talk with the level designer's last thought: "Good ideas are like boomerangs," he says, "even if you throw them away, they often come back."