Demons of Experimentation: Level Slicers
Convention-class demon are sneaky because they blend with the background and it’s very difficult to realize you’re succumbing to them. Level Slicers devote themselves to make you think about splitting your game in levels too soon.
Level Slicers sometimes leave visible scars like meaningless progress numbers showing up, puzzling loading times and lots of decorative filler in levels that doesn’t need to be so big.
Their main poison are rationalizations:
- Technological limitations
- Delivering immediate reward fixes (junkgames)
- Make progress-status and menus a better trap (menus are another demon)
- “It’s custom, so it must be right”
But the worst variant is “It’s natural that this game is split in levels!”. And then their harm is evident: We are probably thinking we’ll have levels before having a good grasp on the core gameplay. And levels help divide the problem by, in turn, reducing the possible games we could have came up with.
We humans are used to deal with a continuum. We learn to divide and conquer just to make our problems easier to solve. But whose problem are levels solving? the player’s or yours?
Level Slicers are legion. We need more continuous games.
4 Comments so far
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Increasingly, I want games with no level load, that allow me to freely move back and forth through a cohesive, contiguous space. I have this fantasy that in a few years all games, no matter what content or subject matter, will be as “unsliced” as Crackdown.
By Harvey on June 15
@Harvey: loading times are another visible scar of slicing. It’s such a good example, I’m adding it to the text.
But it’s just collateral damage when Levelthink already poisoned the design stage…
By Daniel Benmergui on June 15
I think that Occam’s razor should be applied more often to game design. something like “Don’t add anything until you’re sure you need it”. Everything should come after the core design idea (that should also be as simple as possible). There are cases in which levels are necessary or at least a good idea (when different levels are really different spaces or times or even gameplays), but in a lot of cases I got to really hate the level division.
Lately, I’m starting to hate most of the usual feedback in games (scores, rewards).
By Darío on June 20
[...] level slicing is a demon of experimentation, we, as contestants, will have to break a few mind conventions in order to think about how to [...]
By The Square Octopus » CODEAR Challenge on July 3
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