Designing an Arkane Game Level
Lady Boyle’s Mansion. The Yellow Tulip. The Clockwork Mansion. Crack in the Slab. Morgan’s Apartment.
stin have always taken pride in their meticulously crafted levels, because attention to detail helps tell a story. It sets up a world and feeds you information in ways you might not even consciously be aware of. At their core, every single developer at Arkane is a storyteller and every detail serves the purpose of creating a living world that players can lose themselves in.
“Part of the charm of some games is that sense of transport,” says Harvey Smith, Studio/Creative Director at Arkane Austin. “Being in a well-realized place that feels plausible and coherent… complete. A game with thoughtful level design surprises you, ironically, by matching expectations. Guards follow paths from where they live or drink to where they’re posted. They don’t just exist in place forever to fight you. They did not just materialize there with no walkway or path back to a plausible start point. Similarly, if you can get on the rooftop, you might expect to find a bird’s nest up there, maybe with some valuable trinket inside. Letting the players deviate from the path, explore, follow their whims, and then paying that off, gives players a sense of agency and ownership over their experience in the game world. That’s definitely a large ingredient in our secret sauce.”
Inspired Design
As discussed in the Arkane DNA feature, the founders of Arkane took inspiration from the types of games they love – games that pulled them in and offered incredible levels of player freedom. And the team at Arkane today carries on those values, continuing to take inspiration from games they respect.
“I think a lot of our inspiration for how we design levels comes from older games we loved to play and mod,” says Yoann Saquet, Lead Level Designer at Arkane Lyon. “Games like Thief or Deus Ex showed us how important it is to respect the different intentions and play styles the player could have, rather than imposing on them a specific pace, path, or even morality. Valve games are also inspiring and show well the value of taking each level as an opportunity to propose something unique and original. A good game level is capable of surprising the player. Every game we draw inspiration from are great examples of how powerful a game experience can be when all the disciplines (design, art, narrative, etc.) are tied together, reinforcing each other and creating a cohesive world. We have taken a broad range of influences as we’ve created what we see as the ‘Arkane design philosophy,’ and we are always trying to stay true to that philosophy while also evolving it over time.”
“We value emergent experiences, improvisation and game systems colliding in unexpected ways that can give each player moments that are uniquely their own,” says Dana Nightingale, Campaign Designer at Arkane Lyon. “For any of that to be possible at all, the player needs a space to explore that gives them the freedom to use and take advantage of the tools of the game. We can bring out their creativity with those tools by giving them obstacles and goals and scenarios with many different possible outcomes. Level design is a way to give the player opportunities as well as constraints so that their choices with the game’s systems really matter.”
The Secret Sauce
Where do you even start when you begin work on designing a level for an Arkane game? According to the talented level designers at Arkane Lyon, everything stems from a specific idea. Before the team can begin putting the pieces together to craft those memorable experiences, they first need to clarify the driving force behind the level they’re building – the concept that pushes the design forward.
“Long before we’ve considered how many levels a game should have, or what they should look like, or how long they should be, we begin with ideas,” says Nightingale. “It could be a specific gameplay mechanic, a narrative moment, a setting which offers a unique kind of space for a player to navigate, or even one very strong vignette or image that we find inspiring. We’ll define what the levels will be from this collection of ideas and doing so means that each level is being born from a concept that we’re already excited about.”
“Once we’ve defined the main ideas behind each level, the Level Design team and Level Artists can start looking for references, searching for themes related to these ideas,” adds Saquet. “Then we’ll slowly build everything together, iterating back and forth for months. We want players to have a sense of freedom when they explore our levels. The experience also needs to be exciting and surprising, and it has to accomplish all this without feeling like an artificial ‘game-y’ world. The way we achieve this in our games is by spending a lot of time and effort manually crafting the levels.”
We use the terms “handcrafted” and “meticulous” quite a bit when describing the way Arkane approaches level design. There are no pointless areas or glossed-over details. No matter how mundane a space might appear, there is intent in every alley, corridor and ledge. For players with a desire to explore, there are reasons for them to do so.
Saquet describes the long, arduous process of reworking the Aventa District in Dishonored 2. After the initial creation, areas like this are gone over with a fine-toothed comb, making each alley and apartment as interesting as possible. As Saquet points out, even if a street is less memorable than its impressive destination, it still needs to feel important and rewarding for players.
“The biggest challenge can be to create all of the simple, ‘ordinary’ moments in the game that give it its basic identity,” Nightingale agrees. “It can be tempting to focus completely on the most dramatic and exciting vignettes, but we can’t forget all of the time in between those highlights where the player is simply existing in the world we created. Their experiences in those ‘ordinary moments’ can be why the player falls in love with the game. During those times, we can’t always know what their goals are or what’s catching their interest like we might in a spectacular, complex scenario, and we have to try to strike a balance between making the world feel alive and not overwhelming the player with conflicting points of interest.”
Grounding the Fantastical
How do you make the impossible feel real? And more importantly, how do you make it believable? Because it has to be believable for players to feel the level of immersion that Arkane is famous for, and that’s no easy task.
“First and foremost, I think it’s again part of our desire to constantly surprise players, both the design side and the art side, which helps us introduce the ‘fantastical’ element,” says Saquet. “But because we also want something to feel immersive, we have to think about all the little details and make sure everything makes sense and feels like it could really exist somewhere. The constant collaboration we have between the Level Designers and the Level Artists helps with this balance. We try to work in parallel, and both teams are always trying to push for cool, unique ideas from two different angles; one focuses on gameplay while the other works mostly on visuals. This leads to some not-so-conventional ideas from both teams. But at the same time, they act as a sort of safeguard for their teammates. The Level Artist wants to maintain an architectural structure that makes sense and stays plausible, while the Level Designer wants to make sure players can intuitively understand the level in order to have agency and formulate plans.”
“Our levels are constructed by a large team of designers and artists who bring a variety of skill sets to the table, including many with foundations in architectural design and engineering,” says Nightingale. “We can go wild with our imaginations, confident that our team has the expertise to pull it off in a credible way. We never take for granted that the fantastic won’t mean anything unless the player is feeling immersed in the experience, and the consistent and recognizable can go a long way in building this immersion.”
The Little Things
There’s so much consideration that goes into the creation and implementation of every element in each level. It’s not just the level designers making everything happen; the entire team comes together to ensure everything has a purpose, tells a story, and perhaps most importantly, works. The structure of a level must be intuitive, but for Arkane, it must also be inventive and inspired, even if the average player might never know what’s happening beneath the surface.
“The opening scene of Prey is something I’m incredibly proud of,” says Eric Beyhl, Art Outsourcing Manager at Arkane Austin. “It took so much collaboration between art, design and narrative, all working together on planning, testing and iterating to get the sequence perfect. There were clarity and perception problems – how to trick the player while hiding all the clues right under their noses – and there were mechanical and engineering problems – all the shifting walls and Looking Glass trickery had to actually work! All of it came together to create one of the most memorable openings to any video game, and it sets the tone for the rest of the game. Trust nothing!”
“This is actually one of my favorite things from Prey,” adds Susan Kath, who was the Lead Producer on Prey and now works as the Business Director at Arkane Austin. “Behind the scenes, all the walls and mechanisms really did slide around that way even though players could never see it. The team worked so hard to make sure we were creating something intricate and believable, and it paid off. We love the little things.”
