Every Path of Exile expansion involves a heavy amount of level design. As of the Talisman league last year, our challenge leagues have also started to benefit from the assistance of level designers. We recently expanded our level design team to three developers. Today's news post is an interview with them.
Hi! First of all, please introduce yourselves. How did you come to join the team at Grinding Gear Games?
Josiah D: I attended one of our local game developer meetups and Chris mentioned that Grinding Gear Games was looking for a level designer. I had not done any game design work since moving back home to New Zealand and was keen to make use of my previous experience.
Tom M: I returned to New Zealand after working abroad for many years in countries such as Russia, Malaysia, Korea, Australia, and the UK. I really wanted to get back to the forests, seaside and pleasant climate of my own country. Path of Exile had just launched when I got to Auckland, and I found a job teaching digital media which involved game design using UDK, amongst other things, and tools like ZBrush and 3ds Max. The whole time I was there I had an eyeball on working at GGG. I played the game for about three months straight and decided to write an application, and even spent a whole day on the bus to go watch Jonathan give a thirty minute talk about the development at a games summit. What interested me was the ongoing development of the same product. It's a really big scale project. Luckily, just when I was finishing the teaching work, Chris contacted me back and said they needed a level designer.
Chris G: I was looking for Level design opportunities around Auckland when I stumbled upon a YouTube video of Jonathan's live presentation for the Random Level Generation system. I had been looking into procedural content generation and a more systemic approach to level design for a bit at that time, so it really got my attention and excitement.
What have you worked on before Path of Exile?
Josiah D: I've worked on Pirates of the Burning Sea, Neverwinter Online and Age of Empires Online.
Tom M: I started professional CG work in 2000, and I've bounced around a lot of small studios in various roles. I worked at Mosfilm, I worked for universities, and broadcast and game studios. Just to see if I could, I wrote a technical guide to UE3 for Packt, a work-from-home project which turned out really nicely but took about six months. I also made a hand-painted graphic novel, Void Horizon.
Chris G: My experience is mostly AAA console titles: Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2: The Pre-Sequel, Rainbow Six: Siege, Alice: Madness Returns and a few others... When I moved to New Zealand I got into mobile game development for a short time until the local Gameloft office was shut down.
What is your favourite thing you've worked on for Path of Exile?
Josiah D: The Labyrinth is certainly one of the most interesting things we've done from a level design perspective. I love using our random terrain generation system to make replayable content though. You can't make perfectly curated experiences, but the potential for fun and varied environments and interesting combinations is well worth it.
Tom M: In terms of what players see, I guess there's a map where the Daresso Pits and Colosseum areas, which are separate in Act 4, are combined with heights you can go up and down. I pushed this mashup of two tilesets through to see how it would look because I thought it was cool, and nobody objected. It's a carnage level full of monsters, so I guess mostly people are busy trying to survive it when they play it rather than looking at the scenery, but it was fun to push the content further. We then took the same idea in the Labyrinth by combining the dry garden area with the elegant house area to make a hybrid indoors/outdoors extra section. The technical features of doing it weren't trivial, because the lighting has to work and the heights of the tiles is different. I thought it would be easy, but we had to figure out a slew of little technical issues to get it to work. I also did first pass concept art on the Stone Circle feature of the Talisman league. We had to make this asset that would fit in any level type, so I thought floating stones would help, which is how it ended up in production.
https://p7p4m6s5.ssl.hwcdn.net/public/news/26-04-2016/RockCircle.png
Chris G: The trap challenges made a very interesting subject to work on. Because I had just joined the team I had to get accustomed to the PoE design philosophy. At the same time I had to find a different way to approach level design to create interesting hand-crafted traps and challenges, as opposed to the more random / systemic design that had been used until then.
Path of Exile has randomly generated areas. How does this affect the level design process?
Josiah D: We need to broaden our designs to include a lot of variation. We want players to feel immersed in the levels they're playing through and have interesting experiences there, but the areas we design do not have one specific path to them. We'll make several different interesting encounter spaces and plan for them to work well combined with each-other, multiplying the possible combinations as we add more pieces. Sometimes we impose restrictions to limit poor combinations (and of course, sometimes we plan badly and introduce them), but most of the time the goal is to build a big set of distinct and interesting terrain, and allow it all to be interchangeable in a way that creates a fun area. Fairly challenging to pull off, but it's great when it works well.
Tom M: Well, there's pockets of designed layout and set pieces that get randomly distributed, but it's still quite controlled. In fact the process of controlling it so it balances is quite complex. If I hadn't marked zillions of CG students using spreadsheets I wouldn't ever have been able to handle the spreadsheet work we do to track relative experience points for each area of the game for example. We have this massive document that lists things like monster count and chest count per area which is batch produced from running thousands of generated levels to get an idea of averages. Each level has to fit within scope so it's not too bare or too dense. Sometimes changing one feature, like adding an extra variant to the first level, The Twilight Strand, can tip things in unexpected directions. Racers noticed immediately when I added an extra level variant that was a bit longer because it impacted their chances to win instantly. The fix is also part of the soup, so even though the levels are generated with randomisation elements, it's the maintenance, as much as the creative part, that we spend a lot of time on.
Chris G: This was something very new for me, I was used to hand-crafted levels where every square meter of the level is is controlled and carefully placed for a reason and there's no room for variation or randomness. So when I started making levels here, and I had to wrap my head around the fact that rooms do not have controlled entrances and exits, and can be rotated in any direction or even flipped... it was quite unsettling at first, I had to rethink my whole design process. Since I could not use the traditional "I know where players will come from and leave from" method, I had to be way more flexible and "multiple-configurations-compatible" in my designs.
The Ascendancy expansion introduced The Trials of Ascendancy and The Lord's Labyrinth. How does the level design for these areas differ from the rest of the game?
Josiah D: Well, we added traps, which is thematically really cool, but mechanically pretty tricky to keep fun in Path of Exile. Wherever traps are involved, we're doing a lot of classic level design, making a very specific thing for a player to interact with in a set of specific ways. This is the first time we've done dangerous terrain in the game, and we needed to add some new tech and do a lot of tuning to get it to play well. We're not done yet actually, as extended playtesting and feedback from the community continues to expose things we can improve and iterate on.
The labyrinth also has another fun level design feature: daily static layouts. We use these as a sort of community challenge, where each day the labyrinth has a set of challenges and rewards that remain in place for a day. Enterprising explorers (shoutout to redditor SuitSizeSmall) can share their discoveries with the rest of the community, and help people who are looking for shortcuts or tips find their way through an otherwise punishing area. Of course, if the labyrinth were fully static this would get pretty boring, so we use random variation within this larger structure to keep things from getting too stale.
