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Melan

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Posts posted by Melan

  1. Sotha, I will debate two of your points.

     

    -Agreed. The City should have history, and the mapper should think about it. A central square or other kind of significant place should have a background. It is not just The Kings Square, but a square that was used for executions by the kings' command sixty seven years ago.

     

    This can be rewarding, but there is a lot to be said for presenting a few unexplained mysteries that make the player's imagination go. A certain level of ambiguity is beneficial for a thiefy game, contributing to the mysterious ambience of a location. Also, suggesting something is a very good way of presenting non-vital information. Unlike traditional shooters, the Thief series and TDM offer a less frantic kind of gameplay, where similar nuances are easier to give to the player - especially with the need to be observant.

    This ties nicely into your next idea:

     

    -Yes. Give a few hints of things to come. Corrupt the clues, do not give anything outright until the moment is correct.

     

    -Loot should be placed realistically. It shouldn't always be behind loads of trouble.

    What is realism? In my opinion, it should be avoided in its traditional meaning! Players often expect a wish to have, say, a "realistic" city district where they could "break into every house". But a mission like that would be very boring: most realistic houses aren't too interesting. Realistic mediaeval/Victorian cities or mansions don't let you do all that fun climbing. What we need, instead, is maybe a suggestion of reality, but always filtered through the lens of interesting.

  2. Something that came up in a discussion about designing dungeons for fantasy roleplaying games and which I also enjoy tremendously in Thief maps: a certain kind of structure to a level involving the common use of interlocked loops or circular routes. There is something magical to me about climbing up to a ledge, going through an apartment in a house into an inner courtyard, and carefully jumping down to a ledge that takes you through a small garden back to your starting point. Constructing levels that conform to these specifics is one of my design goals with Dromed. My favourite example from well known missions is the area in the second half of The Haunted Cathedral, where you have a street patrolled by zombies with ledges on the side and various areas these venues lead to. During your explorations, you can "experience" the same place from multiple perspectives; sometimes from below, sometimes from above. Calendra's Legacy features a similar idea with its city, where you have to retread the same ground under different circumstances. The mission is also clever in that it combines freedom of movement with subtly restricting it - e.g. you can use canals as a convenient escape route, but they channel you to a small number of exit points. If you want to get ahead, you need to navigate on ground.

     

    In a more abstract sense, this comes back to reuse of space as proposed by Gaylesaver's short but excellent design tutorial.

     

    I also think story is a bit of a red herring; in any case, it is a term often meant too literally and restrictively to a game scenario.

  3. LotP could have benefited from even more explorable areas, but maybe that's my recollection clouded by playing that level about a million times. When you think about it, I guess it had a pretty good amount of different places to go. I think there may be a design trap, in that if you make a really really large, detailed space mostly for the purposes of atmosphere and realism, users may have different expectations than the designer about what the point of the mission is.

    That's a very good point. I recall first playing missions like the Bonehoard or Life of the Party. Now that I've seen them several times, know them inside out and have almost nine years of Thief experience under my belt (wow, has it really been that long? :blink: ), they seem much shorter than on the first encounter, when I was lost in the burrick tunnels and didn't dare to move lest these creepy things kill me.

     

    So what a level needs isn't limitless choice; just the illusion of limitless choice. This is best achieved through complex non-linear level design with side-areas that are of variable difficulty to discover... so you may find two or three easier ones if you breeze through, more if you are committed to exporation, and rewarded with a few extras if you are really thorough and resourceful. LotP worked magnificiently in this regard; what with the inventor's attic or the sunburst device, for example. Finding that place without walkthroughs was just way too cool. (The other moral of my post: the mission would have been much less fun if it forced me to find all secrets, and disguised them behind those annoying mini-swithces.)

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