Blog Quest - Half Life`s Level Design!

        When it comes to designing Levels, I truly believe that a great design can create the difference between a drab and boring game, to one that can change a players life forever.  Level design is such an important element to the games overall experience, which is why I have decided to be one of the Level designers for our GDW project this upcoming year.  To begin designing a level for any sort of game, I usually tend to step back and ask myself a few questions.  What type of mood should the level set for the player, will it be open or linear, and what sort of characters will be inhabiting this area.  To successfully convey all of these elements to the player in a meaningful fashion, I tend to treat the Level I am creating as though it were an NPC with no dialogue. I want the player to feel as though there is a history to the area, like the level itself is a living breathing entity with its own personalities.  One game that I feel perfectly portrayed this feeling, was Valve`s Half-Life 2 released in 2005.

The First Thing The Player Sees Upon Entering City 17

       Half-Life 2 starts the player off with an incredible level structure immediately after the player steps off the train into City 17.  All around the player are objects depicting scenes of poverty and an almost slavery type feeling.  This is further enforced by the leader Wallace Breen addressing all of his subjects through the large screens posted throughout the level.  Instantly the player feels a sense of sadness and dread, suffering surrounds them and the level designers created the level to allow the player to explore and see this.  The player does not even enter any combat until close to 20 minutes into the game.  This is so that the level designers can set the overall tone of the game and show that Gordon`s personality is not that of a soldier.  Once Gordon enters the battle however, we begin to see a different level design entirely.  Instead of innocent, weak NPC`s we are introduced to the resistance who help direct Gordon on his way through the story.

      One of the best moments in the game for me was when the player first receives the gravity gun.  Instead of a basic tutorial on how the gun works, the level designers have the player play a game of fetch with `Dog`, the giant mechanized pet of Alyx Vance.  This is a simple, safe, and controlled environment that allows the player to get their bearings with the weapon, before being thrown the the hordes of combine soldiers.  

     Not only is this level my favorite because of the introduction because of the gravity gun, but because of the events that occur directly after.  After a combine attack, the player is forced into a zombie and gore infested town known as Ravenholm.. This shows the outstanding level design of the team at Valves as it is such a 180 in what the player has been used to up to this point.  Instead of being in open areas fighting human soldiers with the help of the resistance, the player is forced into a town of horrors that took me completely off guard the first moment I played.  When a game is able to instill that sense of shock and awe, simply by a change of scenery, it shows how much thought was put into the structure of the Half - Life 2 levels.   

The incredibly designed city of Ravenholm.
Home to some of the worst horrors I have seen in a video game.

      As one of my favorite games of all-time, I could list many more reasons as to why the level design in Half-Life 2 is near perfect and one of the reasons I wanted to get into level designing in the first place.  When it comes down to it however, Half-Life 2 is such a great game because it encompass all of the elements needed to make a linear level structure seem so open and magical.  It allows the player to feel as though they have options on how they want to tackle certain situations, while still keeping them moving towards the final goal of the level.  Although I am more prone to open worlds adventures, the level design and overall feel of the Half-Life 2 universe is one that all linear action games should strive to try resemble.  

The protagonist Gordon Freeman portrayed on the box of Half-Life 2