Suggestions and Subjective Guidelines for Custom Story Level Design

[PathOS]

The idea I wanted to try with this thread is to sort of discuss/debate some Level/World Design practices which could help make SOMA Custom Stories more rewarding.

Preface that everything of course when it comes to design is subjective and people shouldn't be dissuaded from building what they want. My hope is that this can be where "positive feedback" can be discussed in terms of coming up with suggestions and understandings of what kind of Level Design would be most engaging for players.

I in no way claim to be an "Expert" other than my decades of gaming and just recently binging on Amnesia Custom Stories in addition to SOMA. I will certainly defer to posters who've had actual mod and HPL Engine experience when it comes to things.

• Every Room has a Reason - A good ideal to strive for would be to try to make sure that every room and corridor you create and build should have a plausible reason for being there. I'd like to think that what made SOMA so special was how every corridor and room that you visited had something in it that told a story. Even if the room was empty and lacked any items to see (though I cannot recall any room in SOMA having absolutely "nothing" in it) there was some visual cue or prop in it that added to the story either by giving you a sense of history of the room and what it is used for, or what occurred there prior to you arriving. But yeah, like any design, it always helps to try to roughly block out a level map in Photoshop or some image, and of course you can always then use that as an in-game map document that player picks up and reads.

• Use Props Judiciously - This is definitely going to be very subjective, but the point was something that I came up with after playing through a lot of Amnesia Custom Stories (in particular The Great Work), there can be a tendency I've noticed for some people to just litter their maps with meaningless props to interact with. In Amnesia of course, it was fodder for people to open every drawer just to find the randomly placed Tinderbox in one somewhere, otherwise those objects would have no meaning, and in fact entire rooms full of them would be meaningless overall. I think to me this goes back to one of Frictional's core designs of "Respect the Player", and modder's should respect that the player will likely be driven by OCD to open and search through every asset that is interact-able.

• Lighting sets the Mood - I have a feeling that a lot of stumbling in the new HPL3 will be the lighting system. In Amnesia of course I think there was an overall ideal of just making things pitch black like the game since darkness was something to be utilized in that game. In SOMA the lighting was more geared towards evoking a sense of uneasiness in the levels and helping to make them oppressive, which is more than just making it pitch black. From what has been experimented with so far by a few here, there definitely is going to be a lot of learning about how to effectively use the lights in the engine to set the right mood for each room and corridor.

• When retreading Paths, Change things up - One thing I think is important when it comes to both making use of good design and being able to reuse areas already constructed is to make sure that there will be something new for the player when they go back. One of the reason that "Metroidvania" level design became popular is the fact that when you retread your steps, you usually find areas that are now accessible after acquiring new skills, or that the level design has changed due to the player's actions. One thing I love to design is creating nice pristine (or "Normal") environments and then destroying them for when the player goes through them again, leading to lots of gameplay elements (like using the power pack to charge unpowered/damaged control stations/computers). The idea of course is that the player should never get bored/annoyed at having to retread their steps over and over looking at the same environments again and again.

So, that's what I've got to start with, please feel free to add your own ideas and suggestions or to take issue with what I've already said, or add to them