Game: Area 51

Area 51 is a last generation console title that is a spiritual successor to the orginal lightgun arcade title by the same name. It was a good FPS. Not a GREAT FPS, but a game that was at the very least fun, had a breadth of features that made it competitive in the marketplace, and a good sense of humor. It just didn't stand out amongst some really great titles that had come out just before it (Half Life 2 and Halo for starters). Even so, I had a lot of fun working on it.

My contributions

This was my first chance to really focus in on the craft of level design, since in my previous role I had been a jack-of-all trades artist/level designer. I can easily say that this was my most productive span as a level designer by far. While I published five levels and helped with a handful of others, I easily created over a dozen if not upwards of twenty. While that may seem like a lot of waste, in many cases the best way to learn is to try and then fail (not ‘try to fail’ mind you) learn from the mistakes made, and then try again. ?Fortunately, given how multiplayer levels were made for Area 51, the only real waste was the time I spent making them, and the time fellow designers and QA spent poking holes in their design.

My responsibilities were largely the same for one level to the next. I only created a few custom models, such as doors, and I?didn’t paint textures except for a single ceiling tile for the level Cauldron. I did the layout, lighting, weapon/ammo placement, sound placement, decal placement, and scripting. ?The levels below are listed in their order of implementation.

Shaft

The first level I worked on was actually one of?QA’s favorites. Shaft is a tiny level with only three rooms laid out in a spiraling pattern with a flaming shaft at the center of the largest room. Why?QA, and many players, liked it was because there was really nowhere to run making it a complete bloodbath. Great for anyone looking to blow off steam.
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HillKing

This level derived its name more from Capitol Hill than King of the Hill, albeit it was still had somewhat of a double meaning. ?The theme (or packages for you Unreal folks), reminded me of the pale marble architecture I have observed while visiting D.C. This map, while significantly larger than Shaft, is still smaller than some of the gargantuan levels that I made such as Bridge or Core. Other than the air conditioning ducts the players could jump up on, the flow was simple and elegant with multiple tiers to break up the sight-lines and allow a good sniper to be effective. If map-scaling had not been introduced, I would have invested more time in making levels of this size. It simply had the right layout and dimensions to accommodate all of the game’s weapons equally.
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Bridge

Bridge is a massive and sprawling level that was an exploration for how map-scaling could work. It had its fun spots but in retrospect could have been more cohesive and far less confusing. ?I was hoping that we could scale up to 32 players, and for a time it looked like it was going to become a reality, but it?wasn’t long before launch that the decision was made to limit scaling to 16 players because anything higher would be too hard on the server (the console being the server) and be too bandwidth-intensive for the day. I think 16-32 players is where Bridge would have really shined. ?Oh well, some people still liked it so in it went!
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Core

This turned into my favorite scaling map but it?didn’t start that way. ?At first it was a collection of odd rooms with some really?janky?flow between them. ?It may not have been cut by my lead, but it was certainly on my own personal cutting board. ?What saved the level was a late tech solution for the wind tunnel (Thank you D.Michael), and finding better ways to use the?teleporters?that had been recently been improved. ?This level is similar to Bridge is size, however even when at full scale offered a much tighter flow where players who knew the map could quickly get from one end to another.

As a side note for those who played the map — yes, I died many times too trying to make the jump pad at the bottom of the chasm but eventually mastered it too.
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Cauldron

This map was going to be a triumph of Frankenstein proportions! ?I say Frankenstein because I smashed together a bunch of disjointed themes into the same level, turned on the juice, and somehow it took on life. ?I say WAS because it fell victim to a late movement speed tweak (the run got slower), thus making traversal across the fully scaled up map laborious at best. ?Curse you *@#!)% S)#%& for that change (you know who you are)! To be fair though, Quake is too slow for me ;)

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How Multi-player Levels Were Made

The process by which multi-player levels were made was a bit different than how single player levels were handled. ?The multi-player team was handed the keys to a nice car and told not to wreck anything. So, instead of a long?pre-production cycle we went about reusing already existing assets (some of which had been cut from single player levels) to stand up level ideas very quickly, get people playing them, and iterating on our levels based on the feedback. ?Not a bad loop for a level designer, since we spent much more time iterating on the end-product as opposed to getting stuck second-guessing things on paper.

The first step for me was to scribble out a level layout on paper (I wish I remembered to keep those), and draw as smooth of a line as I could through the map to indicate how the players would hopefully navigate. ?One thing I wanted to establish, especially since I would be doing death-match maps to start and I was anticipating the movement speed to be fast, was circular or looping flow where the player could just keep running without having to stop, backtrack, or otherwise feel the need to lose momentum. ?If I drew an arc that seemed too flat or the line terminated, then I’d probably made a mistake somewhere. I’d also add any features that could unbalance the map, such as the Meson Canon (the equivalent of Doom’s?BFG2000) to make sure that acquiring these powerful items became a little more difficult or dangerous. This process took?maybe up to an hour for larger levels. Each one of my levels had about an hour of what I would term actual ‘preproduction’.

This was the first experience I gained working with a kit of modular level parts. ?So, for example, a wall panel might be square (2x2m, 4x4m, etc.) or rectangular (2x4m, 4x8m, etc.) with the goal being that they could join seamlessly with themselves, floor or ceiling pieces built with the same dimensions inside of the same theme. ?Any seams that might appear between models, which did happen at times, were covered up by placing column pieces at the intersections. This sometimes game levels a very columned look, but that was far better than a very broken one. Unlike Unreal or Radiant, there was no way to build custom geometry inside of the editor itself, but that?didn’t really slow us down since we already had almost any piece that was needed.

After the basic layout was established and with just enough lighting to get the feel of the space, more detailed passes were made to implement any special scripting using a the game’s proprietary scripting system. ?Each script object was dropped into the level and linked visually through drop-down menus. ?There was enough control logic to string together some pretty elaborate sequences when necessary but it was scripting system was protected enough that I don’t recall the scripts ever breaking the level. The scripts could be run live in the editor, which was great for quickly determining whether or not it worked, which worked for almost everything except for playing around with dynamic lighting or anything that really should be checked out on the console anyway. ?Being dropped into the world the scripts were organized spatially, but they were also dropped into folders hierarchically so that people unfamiliar with the level could find them easily.

Once the level layout and scripting seemed solid then a lot of time and attention were paid in polish passes for lighting, adding decals, laying down environmental?FX, sound placement and so on. ?While this?didn’t really change how fun the level was from a?gameplay?standpoint, these passes certainly improved the?immersiveness?of the experience.

On occasion I would break open 3dsmax?to create a custom model where the theme fell short for multi-player purposes, or paint a quick texture in?Photoshop, but I’d estimate that 90% of my time was spent in the level editor or play-testing levels. ?Honestly, it was a blast!

The World’s Smallest Post-Mortem

What went right

  • Solid tools. I never felt like the tool stood in the way of creating a good design
  • Good team with strong tech leadership
  • Midway seemed supportive in making a good game
  • Personally, a very enjoyable and productive project
  • Level design could stay flexible until the very end of production
  • All of the multi-player level designers remained productive at all times

What went wrong

  • The game came out too late and without a clear feature to set it apart from the competition
  • Multi-player?wasn’t a real focus until late in the project thus these features, apart from map-scaling and “Infection,” mode, everything was run-of-the-mill
  • Not being open-world when open-world was red hot hurt game’s the ratings and overall appeal

Upon Further Review…

The bulk of reviewers out there felt that the game was technically competent, somewhat engrossing, and relatively fun. So, it was little above average their minds. ?I think that if judged solely on its own merits it was a little better than the reviews indicated, and specifically for the PS2 it was more of a standout amongst a thinner FPS crowd. What the reviewers wanted was the next step in FPS design but instead they received a well-crafted game that didn’t break from the mold. ?Financially speaking it did well enough to earn a sequel; albeit, one that?didn’t set the world on fire.

Eventually, as with all things Midway, things came to an end and the studio shut down in 2009. A pit really as they had a talented core group of people there when I moved on.

Additional References

For more information on Area 51, please check out the following links: