Level Design

As I am working on my next mission, defending Clark Air Base in the Philippines, I wondered about level design.

I consider games as emotional roller coasters, you play the game because you want to feel a certain feeling (the thrill of finishing a race, the joy when you survive a hard battle against an opponent...). It's also important that i forget that I am playing a game. Games like Civilization and excellent written missions in Il-2, can suspend your disbelief. In those games I am really trying to make the Greeks survive, or I am really fighting it out with an enemy Zero.

Yet console games tend to fail in these field. As i played game after game, I noticed that these console games always boiled down to beating the level (and by consequence the level designer). There is no suspension of disbelief, because often you have to reload the game after the x-time fight with a boss monster. Thats the reason why I fell out with console games, the suspension of disbelief was no longer maintainable (on top, after you played your 10nth FPS they all start to look the same).

Ironically, while designing my next mission, I discover I have to do my own level design. But I try to avoid creating a mission that would not stand out. So I spend a lot of time, loading the mission, playing it (or viewing it) just to figure out if this or that explosion is right. The mission will be based on real events, but it is crucial that the player has a "wow" experience. At this rate I hope to have the mission ready within two weeks.

In the meantime I posted another AAR, this time based on the "White Sun, Blue Sky" - campaign. You can read it all at SimHQ or on this blog.

Happy Reading



PS This is a movie I discovered (I already posted it on SimHQ)