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Forge Design Theory Lessons *long*
Posted By: GodlyPerfection <godlyperfection@reachingperfection.com>Date: 10/13/10 11:07 a.m.


Hello HBO,

A good friend of mine, Time Glitch, referred me over to this site. He feels that what I have to offer is valuable for the HBO community, so I figured I would drop by and share my stuff.

Below you will find the index for a series that I have been writing since August 1st 2010 on my game/level design blog @ ReachingPerfection.com. It is a series focused around general level design theory topics that I have learned through using forge in Halo 3 and Halo Reach. This series isn't a step by step process of how to geomerge or setup teleporters or anything technical like that. This series is focused on level design theories that can be used in more than just Halo. The series includes topics such as eye catching, path manipulation, smooth spawning, color contrast, advertising, incentives, deterrents, etc. They are offered as guidelines to help refine your own design techniques, not as law. Each lesson is written to be as long as a single typed page in word so that it isn't too much to read. They each consist of one intro paragraph and three one paragraph sections. Take your time reading them as it is a lot of information.

I write a new lesson every 3-4 days on my blog... typically one on Wednesday/Thursday and one on Saturday/Sunday. I will keep this thread updated with each new lesson that I post. All of your feedback and criticism is welcome. For specific lessons I would advise commenting on the actual lesson to help spark more discussion on the topic. Feel free to spread the word, repost (with credit and links of course), and pretty much do whatever you want with these in order to help improve the custom games/forging community. I still have loads of topics to cover and will be doing this for a long while.

As for credentials, I have been a forger since Halo 3 came out. My old gamertag was AZN FTW and I was one of the original sixish guilders that helped bring Forgehub from its infancy as a wordpress blog to the full-fledged vBulletin forum that it is today. I created one of the most popular community made gametypes, Conquest. I also was one of the two designers of Ravinia, one of the maps in the Halo 3 maptionsack playlist. I've got 3 years of forge under my belt and have helped out and taught thousands of other forgers. This level design series is being transcribed one lesson at a time to Gamasutra.com and over half of the ones that have been transcribed have been featured. It has been used by a couple of high school teachers and college teachers to help introduce students to level design. It is also "stickied" as a top topic on the Halo Reach forum at Bungie.Net.

Thank you all for your time and I look forward to hearing from each and every one of you. My gamertag is the same as my username. I hope these help you as much as they have helped myself and the thousands of people that have read these.

Forge Lessons Index

Lesson 1: First Impressions

  • A bad first impression could mean the death of your map
  • Every detail (from thread organization to actual gameplay) can have an effect on your map's fans
  • Having at least one good first impression will increase your credibility

Lesson 2: Knowledge is power

  • A map should teach players about it's most important features
  • Teaching players the map allows them to give an accurate assessment of it's gameplay
  • Players have a more enjoyable experience when they are taught the map and are put on even ground with their competitors

Lesson 3: Path Manipulation

  • Path Manipulation is the ability to control a player's movement
  • Using Path Manipulation allows us to craft the experience that we want our players to have
  • The golden rule of Path Manipulation is that players will always take the shortest route to their current goal

Lesson 4: Perspectives

  • A perspective is essentially a screenshot in time of a player's current view
  • Crafting perspectives to your liking can help create the decisions and experience that you want your players to have
  • Utilizing art theory is a big part of analyzing a perspective

Lesson 5: Deterrents

  • Deterrents are things that discourage the act of proceeding
  • Deterrents are not very widely used due to them being "discouraging" and not always effective, however with the right tweaks they can be very effective
  • In level design the theory of deterrents is under-researched and there is still a long way to go to understand the concepts and differences of static and dynamic deterrents

Lesson 6: Incentives

  • Weapons and powerups are not the only incentives that exist
  • Most incentives are not permanent, sometimes they are there and sometimes they aren't
  • Don't forget that you are giving your players an advantage and make sure you account for it and balance that advantage out

Lesson 7: Combat Congestion and Traffic

  • Combat Congestion is tons of players traversing through one area causing massive chaos and confusion, taking away from the skill required
  • Traffic is the analysis how players are spread out around the map
  • Everything comes into play when learning to control the chaos, just like everything else in level design

Lesson 8: Eye Catching

  • Eye catching is the power of attracting the human eye in order to change a player's perspective
  • Eye catching has the power of not only changing a player's perspective but naturally gravitating players towards the attention grabbing area
  • Attention grabbing techniques can be applied to incentives, deterrents, and important areas of the map

Lesson 9: Perspective Variance

  • Perspectives should not only be observed in individual instances but also as a batch/group of perspectives over time
  • Perspective variance is observing the differences between perspectives over time
  • Eye Catching and Path Manipulation are key players in observing and controlling perspective variance

Lesson 10: Spawn Perspectives

  • The spawn perspective is the first fully controllable perspective that the player sees in a map
  • All things in a spawn perspective need to be observed in order to predict all future perspectives
  • Perfecting the spawn perspective can fully influence all following perspectives of the player, giving you huge control over the player

Lesson 11: Smooth Spawning

  • Decisions forced to be made during the first few seconds of spawning interfere with the initial spawn thought process and cause hiccups in gameplay
  • It is important to remove anything that may change the player's perspective drastically
  • Removing all interferences to the initial spawn thought process can smooth out and polish gameplay

Lesson 12: Path Maps

  • Path maps serve as a tool to analyze the designer's current path manipulation
  • Two types of paths exist in path maps... objective paths are the shortest path to the player's current goal and divergent paths are paths to other possible goals
  • Path maps change constantly as players move around the map, make decisions, and change goals

Lesson 13: Area Introduction

  • Area Introduction is exactly that... showing players all of the major sections in your map
  • Players may eventually learn all the areas by exploring, but you don't have their attention forever
  • All sorts of Path Manipulation tools can be used to introduce new areas to players naturally

Lesson 14: Essence

  • A map's essence is what defines the map and makes it unique
  • An essence is made up of a list of goals that serve as building blocks and can be used in multiple maps
  • By prioritizing your list of goals you are able to effectively make important and difficult decisions for your map

Lesson 15: Purpose

  • Everything in your map should be helping towards your map's essence, if not it needs to go
  • Prioritizing your list of goals can help you improve your map by replacing something with something that serves a higher purpose
  • Most additions to a map can serve more than just one purpose and it is the designers job to juggle the pros and cons of each possible addition

Lesson 16: Innovation

  • Innovation will pull eyes to your map and make it stand out above the thousand others out there
  • Aesthetics are the easiest to grab a player's attention, making something visually unique can make your map stand out
  • Breaking gameplay standards is another way to stand out; take every challenge and never say never

Lesson 17: Color Contrast

  • Contrast is defined as the difference between two colors that are next to each other
  • Both high contrasting and low contrasting color combinations have their uses in a scene
  • Use high contrasting colors for objects you want to stand out in a scene and low contrasting colors for objects that need to blend in with the scenery

Lesson 18: Patience

  • Never rush your map, it will delude it's quality and reduce your credibility as a designer
  • Don't lie to yourself or your friends; everyone is guilty of not taking enough time to improve their map... including me
  • Even if you are close to done or your map is already published, take the time to improve and make changes to your map to improve your skills as a designer

Lesson 19: Threat Zones

  • A threat zone is the area that a deterrent affects, weighted base on where it is most effective
  • Static zones rarely move, like explosives, turrets, etc. Dynamic zones move constantly and have to learn to be controlled for maximum control
  • Players make assumptions of a deterrent's threat zone and move accordingly to decrease the risk

Lesson 20: Safe Spawning

  • Being caught flat-footed (or unprepared) is an un-enjoyable experience on spawn
  • There are many things that need to be kept in mind when avoiding unsafe spawning
  • Spawning is one of the most important topics for level designers and it can make or break a map

Lesson 21: Incentive Weighting

  • Incentives need to be assigned a weight/priority based on your map's essence
  • Creating a "heatmap" of your map's incentives will help you visualize where players are more likely to travel
  • Learning to spread out your map's incentives properly allows you to make every area of your map enjoyable and "balanced"

Lesson 22: Rule of Thirds

  • Dividing a picture, screenshot, painting in thirds both vertically and horizontally will help you find its focus points
  • The rule of thirds is a common rule of thumb for photographers so make it a common rule of thumb as a level designer in terms of perspectives
  • By using the Rule of Thirds you have much more control and influence over a player's perspective

Lesson 23: Static Perspectives

  • Static perspectives are perspectives that players have no control of
  • Static perspectives are fully controlled by the designer giving great power when influencing a player's opinions
  • Static perspectives need to be viewed as pieces of art that you are trying to sell to your audience

Lesson 24: Advertising

  • Advertising is a very important part of level design
  • Advertising can be found everywhere and is used everywhere like in news channels, restaurants, websites, etc.
  • The first rule to advertising is forgetting that you are advertising your content and to instead offer your services and stop being selfish

Lesson 25: Investment

  • Everything you do can be an investment towards your future
  • It is important to start doing things that can benefit you most... mainly selfless acts
  • Time is money and giving it to others as an investment for the future is a very powerful thing

Lesson 26: Nurturing

  • Nurturing in advertising is all about turning your fans from casual fans who download your content to hardcore fans that spread your content
  • Taking the time to personally interact with a fan is the best way to get their attention and build your credibility with them
  • Never let a fan slip by, always at least respond and acknowledge that you know they exist

Lesson 27: Reputation

  • Everything you do creates an image of yourself that people see when they hear your name
  • Based on that image people may decide if they will check out your content or not
  • Creating a name for yourself is important and can be done through joining communities and being a helpful loyal member

Lesson 28: Perspective Direction

  • In a heated situation players are always focused on something and learning the direction of their attention will help you design your map
  • Imagining yourself in the player's shows will help you place objects and areas of interest to get the player's attention
  • Remember that most games have a 3rd dimension and the direction of a player's eye on the vertical axis is just as important as the lateral axis

Lesson 29: Degree of Focus

  • Degree of focus is the amount of area that requires a player's attention in order to completely lock down and control their position
  • Degree of focus can be used as a strong path manipulator giving designers the ability to use it as an incentive or deterrent
  • Multiple paths don't instantly increase an areas degree of focus, multiple factors come into play such as perspective variance and lateral and vertical focus

Reaching Perfection Blog



Message Index




Replies:

Forge Design Theory Lessons *long*GodlyPerfection 10/13/10 11:07 a.m.
     I'm Time Glitch, and I approve this message.Time Glitch 10/13/10 1:27 p.m.
           Re: I'm Time Glitch, and I approve this message.gspawn 10/13/10 1:47 p.m.
                 Re: I'm Time Glitch, and I approve this message.GodlyPerfection 10/14/10 1:08 a.m.
     Re: Forge Design Theory Lessons *long*drdoctor 10/13/10 2:03 p.m.
           Re: Forge Design Theory Lessons *long*GodlyPerfection 10/13/10 6:44 p.m.
     ^ Should be required reading for forgersCody Miller 10/13/10 2:16 p.m.
           Re: ^ Should be required reading for forgersGodlyPerfection 10/13/10 8:27 p.m.
     "Reaching Perfection"RC Master 10/13/10 4:49 p.m.
           Re: "Reaching Perfection"GodlyPerfection 10/14/10 6:39 a.m.
     Forge Lesson 30: ApplicationGodlyPerfection 10/18/10 9:51 p.m.
           Awesome! *NM*GrimBrother One 10/18/10 10:00 p.m.
                 Why thank you sir. ;) *NM* *NM*GodlyPerfection 10/19/10 2:12 p.m.
           Re: Forge Lesson 30: ApplicationHedgemony 10/18/10 10:50 p.m.
                 Re: Forge Lesson 30: Applicationdrdoctor 10/19/10 1:49 p.m.
                       Re: Forge Lesson 30: ApplicationGodlyPerfection 10/24/10 1:04 a.m.
                 PDF for you Hedge...GodlyPerfection 10/24/10 12:27 a.m.
                       Oops... messed up the link...GodlyPerfection 10/24/10 12:29 a.m.
                             Re: Awesome, thank youHedgemony 10/24/10 1:31 a.m.
           Awesome dude!Chris101b 10/19/10 3:39 a.m.
     Quick thanks to Louis and GrimGodlyPerfection 10/20/10 11:09 p.m.
           Re: Quick thanks to Louis and GrimChris101b 10/21/10 12:33 a.m.
     Forge Lesson 31: Immersion and PDF CompilationGodlyPerfection 10/22/10 12:43 p.m.
     Forge Lesson 32: CohesionGodlyPerfection 10/27/10 12:16 a.m.
           Forgot the PDF link... oopsGodlyPerfection 10/27/10 12:20 a.m.
     Forge Lesson 33, 34, AND 35 w/ PDFGodlyPerfection 10/30/10 4:56 p.m.



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