Through out all of the current education I'm going through to become a game designer, I decided to sit back and look at level design. By far it isn't simple, nor was it easy in the past. I mean, looking back into the 1980s, I got thinking of what kind of game I could have developed. With the limited amount of technology to play with, I'd be looking at something similar to space invaders or Galaga, so a top down shooter.
Looking at the time span of how long games have existed, a good manner of creating a better understanding as an up and coming game or level designer would be a great benefit for myself. So I looked at a few games, mainly Super Mario bros, Age of Empires, and Guild Wars. To me, I picked up the obvious pointers: all three where from different genres and had different amounts of graphical power. Super Mario Bros featured the old 8-bit colour, Age of empires featured "low end" of modern day graphics, and Guild Wars, with a relatively modern graphics. All the games feature their different gameplay systems thought their environment, if that makes any logical sense. For example, S.M.B. has eight bit platform levels where you have to jump on, throw fireballs, and dodge the occasional shell you kicked for fore, where as Guild wars has vast open areas for players to explore, kill creatures, collect loot, and be killed by creatures. The difference between games in phenomenal in comparison to both the way a level is set out to the gameplay that is involved.
Gameplay can detail out how a level is designed. Wait... it DOES give how a level should be designed. Three examples are BlazBlue Contium's stages, Etrain Odyssey II floors, and Call of Duty 4 Maps. BlazBlue stages consist of are a stationary background, a ground to match, both characters, and the UI displaying health bars. A good example of this would be Training room with a simplest design of lines and really gives the feel of a simulated world for training. Etrain Odyssey II levels are designed specifically for first person dungeon crawling (I'm pretty sure old school RPG players can remember the fun days of that). Luckily, you create a map on the touch screen screen of the DS. Without that, I would have lost myself within the labyrinth multiple times. They are set out as a "You objective is to find the stairs going down" method with the added fun of killing every creature that appears before you. Sure, it gets repetitive, but beating a boss at the end of each stratum (Five floors) sets a good rewarding feeling. Call of Duty maps are set out like all standard shooters: spawn points, flag points if doing capture the flag, and most importantly: enemy players to kill. Imagining fighting game containing dungeon crawling style levels bring a head ache to those pulling off a combo, let alone navigation.
okay, here is a summary of everything in this post, if I could make a game from the eighties, it would be a top down shooter due to the common trend, and their simplistic level design. Levels have evolved and not just from genre to genre, objective to objective, but graphically as well. From the days of 8-bit to the modern gaming era. A genre defines how levels should be set out, where NPCs should exist (or where they should not), and what can be sacrificed for the sake of a story-based game. Side scrolling fighters should not try to make a first person dungeon crawling level, and first person dungeon crawlers should mimic CoD. All in all, a genre defines how a game level should be constructed, and how is should influence the user's experience.
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