In which I draw attention to an old article about level design published by Ken Birdwell of Valve Software about making great levels.

You should know that Half-Life is one of the best first persons shooters ever made. Much of what was done in that game is routine now, or has been ripped off dozens of times. Much of what they did in the game wasn’t even new to them. It had been done before in other places. But Valve put the pieces together in new and stunning ways.

The following article was written in 1999 and discusses how the game went from near failure to near perfection. It’s very worth reading.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_pfv.htm

In particular, I think that these paragraphs are worth mulling over for any content designer:

The second step in the pre-cabal process was to analyze what was fun about our prototype level. The first theory we came up with was the theory of “experiential density” — the amount of “things” that happen to and are done by the player per unit of time and area of a map. Our goal was that, once active, the player never had to wait too long before the next stimulus, be it monster, special effect, plot point, action sequence, and so on. Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.

The second theory we came up with is the theory of player acknowledgment. This means that the game world must acknowledge players every time they perform an action. For example, if they shoot their gun, the world needs to acknowledge it with something more permanent than just a sound — there should be some visual evidence that they’ve just fired their gun. We would have liked to put a hole through the wall, but for technical and game flow reasons we really couldn’t do it. Instead we decided on “decals” — bullet nicks and explosion marks on all the surfaces, which serve as permanent records of the action. This also means that if the player pushes on something that should be pushable, the object shouldn’t ignore them, it should move. If they whack on something with their crowbar that looks like it should break, it had better break. If they walk into a room with other characters, those characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, if not calling out their name. Our basic theory was that if the world ignores the player, the player won’t care about the world.

A final theory was that the players should always blame themselves for failure. If the game kills them off with no warning, then players blame the game and start to dislike it. But if the game hints that danger is imminent, show players a way out and they die anyway, then they’ll consider it a failure on their part; they’ve let the game down and they need to try a little harder. When they succeed, and the game rewards them with a little treat — scripted sequence, special effect, and so on — they’ll feel good about themselves and about the game.