designing levels is a bitch can be extremely challenging. Think about it you must balance the challenge to your players, you have to give them a reason to be there you have to keep it interesting. This all boils down to knowing your audience and, most importantly, knowing yourself. It’s a bit like dating, the hardest part is getting them to play the game. Once they are playing the game a lot of forgiveness can be had. Never the less the game must still keep their interest. If you make it to hard they will stop, if you make it too easy they will stop, if its too predictable, unpredictable, unrealistic, the list goes on the elements must be balanced, or at least close to it, in order to keep the players happy.

So suppose you keep all that in mind you balance everything you design your level; pouring heart and soul into a creation that at last is perfect. Then once the players are released into the level they run through destroying everything, ignoring your clever plans and plots, slaughtering your minions, and generally laying waste to hours, day or months of planning. It’s like watching some one take a flamethrower to the Mona Lisa. I am mostly thinking about DnD levels, but it applies to all RPGs as well as FPSs. There are pages and pages writen about this on the interweb so I am not going to go to indepth other than to say I have a great deal of respect for the people who do it for a living and make the games I love so well. The level design in games like the Half-Life series, Duke Nukem, Fear, Doom II, Quake II and Blood. Here I feel I should mention Doom III, it started out well enough but by the half way point the levels became formulaic, walk in the room shoot the monster, turn around, shoot the new monster that just spawned in, collect the item, lather, rinse, repeat. So what is the key? Hell if I know. Seriously though it comes down to knowing your audience. You have to make them want to play.
We’ll be right back after these messages It’s the carrot and the stick. Offer the players a carrot, show them the prize they want but put some sort of obstacle in the way of getting it. Make them run around getting pummled until they almost die then give them what they want. If the stray from the path you want them to take pull out the stick. Monsters, traps, pools of acid all good choices. Okay I am good with all that I can wield the stick, I can place the carrot what I am having trouble with are PUZZLES. Okay thinking DnD again, I am pretty bright but balancing a puzzle to make it challenging but not impossible or so time consuming to bog the game down? ick. The other problem with puzzles in FPSs and electronic RPGs is once you have solved the puzzle there is ZERO replay value. Take Myst, by all accounts a great game but once you have finished it you can, in turn, finish the game in about five minutes the second time around. This ties into my next thing, how much info you miss the first time through. I tend to watch movies more than once if I like it even a little bit. So I have been watching Dead Mans Chest a lot lately. I’s amazing how much I missed the first time I watched it, the subtlety and the well forethought that that went into what I had previously thought of as a pretty crappy movie that had all the trappings of a sequel. That is to say nothing but fan service. In hind sight though this movie, indeed the entire franchise, is pretty damn good.