Ask a Patron Answered! - Nintendo's Jordan Amaro (Patreon)

Hello! If you missed it earlier, I asked Patrons to submit questions to Jordan Amaro who has worked on Metal Gear Solid V, Resident Evil 7, and Splatoon 2. After receiving many insightful questions, Jordan has now been able to answer as many of 'em as possible!

I've printed his answers below.

I'll be looking for more interesting people in the future - if you're a Patron and you've had an interesting career in games (design, production, PR, journalism, wearing a Pikachu suit at Gamescom, whatever!) please do get in touch on DM. Up to you whether the answers are made public or private among the community.

Okay, here we go.

Royce Lee - what are the most common game design decisions and choices that you make the most often? What's the most important? Is it the balancing of numbers, or do you go about trying to give players a certain experience and make design choices then?

Balancing shouldn’t be a concern until very late. By itself, balancing won’t draw out the fun of your game. This needs to happen much earlier.

However, throughout production all kinds of parameters are adjusted, as level designers start twisting and squeezing content in all kinds of setups; in a way discovering how objects can be used and how much they can express. 

“Experience” is thinking top-down, projecting your intention and making (forcing) the game fit that vision. It usually takes the form of a rough image of the game you’re seeing in your mind. The issue with this is that it is mainly visual and as such misleading. You’re also making assumptions about a game you don’t have anything to show for yet.

I usually think bottom-up, from the player’s actions on game elements that result in interesting situations, to the overall structure. 

Mark Brown - What's your starting point for designing a single player level for a game like Splatoon 2? What's the very first thing that happens?

I look at the Player Character and what his actions are. What the player inputs through the character.

As the Player Character executes his actions, all sorts of effects are produced. Then the game needs to react, and so on. The dialog begins.

The game will usually react through the expression of a number of game objects and actors, ideally governed by a set of simple rules.

When you start implementing content, if said object already exists, connect that object to other objects (up to 2) to find variations.

If it doesn’t exist, request it from the team, provided one object solves multiple design issues and can spawn variations. Redundant objects (same function or too close to another) are not to be requested.

The idea is to find interesting situations, or problems, for the player to solve. At this stage the layout and positioning of the pieces is not even the most important thing to think about. What you’re looking for is the essential idea about what you want to player to execute. 

That triangle may be: Player actions, Game reaction, Intention. In the middle is your situation, what is being played.

Lucas da Silva - what stage of the game's development does everything come together into a cohesive whole? When do you play the level and think: "yes this works"?

This really depends on the complexity of the game (how many parts interact with each other at a given time, are those parts stable in code). 

Some games may come together very early, others won’t for months if not years. MGSV came together very very late.

Ravyu - What do you think of Youtube Game Design analysts such as Mark himself? Do they do justice to the kind of thought and effort you put into your projects? 

Yes. Mark and others bring a good level of accuracy and sharpness to the table. It’s great to see game literacy increasing and being easily available to all. Unfortunately, those initiatives are not picked up enough by the mainstream game press, whose expertise in the field of games is still largely questionable, I feel.

Harry Young-Jones - What are some of the best resources (books, lectures, YouTube channels etc..) that you've found and have utilized while working in game/level design?

Never utilized resource “while” working but I have read a lot of Koster, Schell, Adams, Zimmerman and many others. Less recently I must say. Gamasutra is hit-or-miss. With a higher proportion of the latter.

Harry Young-Jones - What are the 3 most important things you keep in mind when designing a level?

What am I doing here? 

Where am I going with this? 

Am I still doing the same thing? 

You realize, I speak as the player. When you implement content and start playing it, you stop being “you”, the maker, in a sense.

Of course “you” imagined that piece of content and made a series of creative choices to get it to a playable state. But as it’s coming together, you take the viewpoint of the player, thereby tossing your designer’s knowledge for a brief moment. You fool yourself into thinking you don’t know anything about the level and you’re seeing it for the first time. You jump in and out of yourself while making it.

Samuel Read - My question is 'In your experience how can the camera focus and hinder level design? Has a third person camera allowed you to develop things a first person wouldn't?'

The behaviour of the camera will often decide whether you can proceed ahead with what you’re making.

In the case of a camera following a character, that camera constantly collides with meshes and responds to player’s input. As such if the player feels like he needs to look in weird directions, provided he’s playing in good faith; something is wrong in your design intentions and implementation. 

The camera doesn’t necessarily allow or deny anything, as long as you input something then an action is played regardless of camera. But choosing a camera over another will radically change the expression of your game. Dark Souls could be playable in 1st person but it just wouldn’t work really well. RE7 could be in 3rd person but now the environment isn’t cramped anymore, the walls and ceiling are far, the furniture and enemies are small, the trash and objects laying around are tiny.

Dan Michaelis - How do you develop the intuition that the player will 'get it' and you won't have to explain something or put explicit pointers to it in the world?

The ultimate question. I don’t even know if or how intuition is developed. 

While there are some givens:

Present content ahead rather than above, on the sides or behind.

Give proper time to process information on screen instead of throwing everything simultaneously. 

Avoid complicated logic or obscure usage and combination of your mechanics.

Communicate affordances in the least ambiguous manner.

Make the game react in a natural way. 

In truth, even very experienced staff sometimes get it wrong because they are tasked with extracting originality, and that can lead to some funky sequences.  

Kayhwee Lim - what do you think is the most important quality as a game designer?

If you’re more than one, listen.

If you’re more than one and paying everyone else’s salaries, still listen, but less. Direct and be clear in your direction: what you want and why you want it. The how is on us.

Hyunsoo Kim - Have you experienced constraints in trying to attain your original vision when designing games, such as insufficient technology, inconsistency with other parts of the game, etc.; and what kind of solutions and/or compromises did you end up with?

Constraints are the job. Nobody likes a tech whiner at the workplace. From the moment you decide to accept those constraints and work with them, they become the frame that you operate within and as such help you get started. You will love those constraints.

Constraints can be alleviated a bit if you make a strong case and schedule allows.

John Willcox-Beney  - How does the work of the artists, musicians, etc. you work with factor in to your design process? Are there any cool times when some art, music, VA etc. inspired you to make or change a design decision in a game?

Yes, artists are amazing! It’s very easy to be seduced by a piece of art! I’ve done that mistake of tossing my planning and starting from scratch after seeing concept arts, the right reference pictures or modelled scenes. 

However, keep in mind that topology is only one element of gameplay, and certainly not the first or main one. I always design as much as possible with the flattest terrain and the fewest number of meshes possible so they don’t get into the equation. Topology supports your elements when you get to variations, not as a starting point.

If you’ve thrown your work because a hill is now a valley, the issue was in how you planned the relationship between your game elements.

Emma Smith - How much emphasis is placed on making a level/map make physical sense as a traversable space? Obviously there are some games where the gameplay possibilities override the desire for a space that "makes sense," but looking at the games you've worked on, having physically coherent levels seems like more of a priority. How is that handled in development?

Depending on the culture of the team two things may happen.

One is: designers and artists must cooperate throughout production in a synchronous fashion so that both gameplay and art are in balance and no department is stepping on another. 

Two, which I prefer: design has absolute priority throughout production and any discussion or argument is resolved in favour of design.

Second option sounds harsh on artists, but in my experience it eliminates a lot of confusion down the road as it makes designers accountable in their choices and clarifies creative hierarchy so we know what kind of game is being made.

PS: please do talk to your artist early and often.

On MGSV, due to a series of causes spanning months, many locations had already been brushed by artists to a relatively good level of quality… without any level designer yet working on content in these areas. So when the time to implement came, you had to ask the artists to redo a large portion of their work, if not restart from scratch. When this happens, hopefully you’re in good term with the artist.

One thing to keep in mind is that artists need to start producing assets and scenes early on, so it’s difficult to keep them off the levels for too long. But if your game is complex, as are many open-world games; your objects, actors and systems won’t come for months if not years and won’t even be stable to begin with.

Vini Aleixo - What is your methodology for composing level designs? Or you just follow your instincts?

If I can picture the game playing then yes, I just jump in the editor with minimal to no planning.

If I can’t visualize really well or at all; then planning becomes necessary.

Sometimes I also dump various elements in the scene with no apparent relationship and experiment those combinations.

Erik (mit k) - What was a recent creative block/problem you encountered in designing something and how did you solve it?

Just having put together something that I know is not good enough, not being able to find the right angle or frame to make it enjoyable.

I never know when the solution comes. You may go back to planning on paper, take a walk, ask somebody, work on a different task or give it some time. 

Design problems follow me well beyond work I must say, yet luckily a solution usually emerges somehow. 

DSMikeNW - Is there a specific protocol/rule set/common steps a designer follows to create a given level? What advice would you give to a person who can't figure out what is to be in a level?

No, everybody has different ways of working. There is no method, find the one that suits you, it will be the right one. The quality and speed of what is produced is the only criteria.

If stuck go back to the basics: what are my actions, what effects do they carry, how does the game react through the elements I’ve picked for this sequence. And in the middle of this: what is an interesting situation to play? Once you implement that situation (the problem to solve), then it’s only a matter of presenting it well to the player.

NekuSoul - MGS5 has a very open level design, allowing you to enter and leave almost any mission from every angle you want. What are some of the difficulties designing such levels and how much different is the process of these compared to a regular mission?

Remember that “every angle you want” is actually what the designer decided to allow you.

The level design for MGSV is a lot less open that one might think, and for good reasons. Access to the enemy’s base is tightly controlled (designed). Usually two to three, with a main, dangerous road and side, safe paths leading to a viewpoint around 120 meters from the first enemy or tower.

There are only a handful of locations that can be approached from any angle. Not that the game would benefit if that was the case for all of them, bear in mind!

If not in layout, the game is flexible thanks to the interconnections between the elements, resulting in a large possibility space and the mission rule sets that communicates the breath of the game.

The configuration of space doesn’t affect the design as much as the way your events are called: via program or hand-placed triggers and script.

Michele Papucci - How do you tell if a mechanic or a game idea itself will be fun or appreciated from the public? How can you understand if what you're doing will be seen as enjoyable?

I seriously do not know how to answer that. Is it intuition, personal taste, flair, experience? I have no idea.

One lead though: if somebody else has already done it, good for them. But don’t do it. 

Julian Sterling - What's it like coming into a project that's a sequel to a game you didn't work on? (Assuming that's accurate)

Carter - You have worked on an interesting set of games in the sense that all of them are different from eachother. One is a horror game, another is a open world 3rd person shooter, and now you are working on a 3rd person multiplayer shooter. My question is, what is it like designing all these totally different games? Is the adjustment from one genre to another difficult?

Sequel or not, when you come on board in pre-production or production, with team members preceding you; the first thing you want to do is study the game to get your proficiency to the level of your colleagues’.

That means read everything you find, ask tons of questions, play the game a lot. At this stage you’re only catching up. It’s frantic.

Then… Make awesome stuff.

Erik (mit k) - What is the best designed game or level in a game in your opinion?

Lucas da Silva - What are some of your favorite stage designs in games?

Recently; in Inside, the queue processing sequence and ending. The Great Plateau in Zelda BOTW. Way too many galaxies in both Mario Galaxy. All of Captain Toad. Lots of Portal 2. Cainhurst Castle in Bloodborne.

Sandro Dall’Aglio - Hi Jordan! MGS V was a huge step forward in open world interactions. You had very strong dynamics between each game elements. That generated a wide spectrum of solutions to any given problems. How did you approach that? Did you had a doc with all the possible interactions between the game elements or was it more trial and error style?

Documentation on MGSV was very rigorous. As a Game Designer you’re supposed to understand inside-out every component that you want the programmers, artists and animators to create for you. Japanese use the word “planner” for game designer. The nuance is more accurate about what’s expected from you: tell people exactly how you expect everything in your game to work. Plan everything: until somebody writes it in code, write it in your document.

Don’t listen to people telling you that documentation is unnecessary and nobody reads it, if they don’t it’s their fault. Thorough documentation means thorough thinking of your game.

During production, you’d only need to read to largely understand the expected behaviour of an object or actor. Of course, as everybody marches forward, documents are gradually left behind as you are all super busy.

Lci Larocci - Jordan how often do you work with someone else when you are working on game design? Are you mostly left alone to design or do you work with a small team of game designers?

You’re always part of a team, and usually we don’t move forward until there’s a consensus and all questions or worries have been answered and lifted. Big decisions need to be properly discussed so that they are as bulletproof as possible. The plan may change down the road, but at least until it does you’ve got a direction.

Responsibilities are then split between the Designers, this can be done on a voluntary basis if you feel strongly about an area. You may spearhead an entire game mode, a portion of a mode, a system or a mechanic. 

For the implementation, you’re mostly left to your own device. 

Heli Wang - During the design process, how do you decide what aspect of a game to prioritize? For example, if the movement mechanic needs to be rock solid before starting to design the shooting and aiming mechanic, what leads you to that decision?

As you say, the basic mechanics (movement) need to feel good first. That’s the game by default: a character running in a huge test scene that is essentially an obstacle course. Some call this CCC (Camera, controls, character). No rules yet, no enemies, no interactive objects.

Once the character responds well to movement, and you have a few traversal actions, you can increase complexity.

Mind that since you have colleagues, everybody is moving in parallel so they are also producing content as you’re hammering your mechanics.

Alex Richardson - Alternatively do you do observational playtesting, and if so, at what stages and how much?

Playtesting is usually done with your closest peers in the team then gradually to more distant peers within the company and finally with a pool of outside players in a controlled environment. They may be performed early on, at the first vertical slice; or much latter, when you have something stable to show.

I’d say that Japanese companies seem to do be doing a lot less playtesting than Western companies, who use it to an extreme (caricatural) degree. This may sound cheeky, but it’s the designer’s job to make playtests as unnecessary as possible.

Shriveling Fire - hello jordan! what would you say is your biggest priority in developing a single player map? does it change from game to game, or is it generally the same (i.e emphasize some mechanic).

It does change a lot from game to game.

Some games are almost toys, in the sense that there is no story or environment to take into account, only the moment-to-moment interactions within the toy. Instead of toy I tend to use the word object or “mono” in Japanese as it’s closer to how I see games.

Other games, the kind of which I’m happy to play but less inclined to make; are less about the purity, coherence and continuity of the mechanics and more about the “experience”. That game’s reason for being is not its form, but the justification of an experience by way of story, setting, theme, message, intention, world, ect... See it as a sort of icing or lacquering of the mechanics. 

The two have radically different creative preoccupations. Personally, I look at myself as a maker of objects. Could be furniture, jewelry, clock, clothes, houseware. Only in my case it’s games. And I’m a lot more interested in those games that can only be games.

Josh Baker - What will game design and level design look like in the future?

A lot more bad games will get made.