Semantics and materials

This week, I’ve been taking what I’ve learnt from the experiments and putting them into a Skyrim dungeon. Here’s my rough plan:

To keep the project in scope I’ve decided to do a small linear dungeon with various offshoots and hidey holes with goodies down them. Players will be encouraged to go to these areas using the visual cues that I’ve been looking into.

Unfortunately, due to a recent update to Skyrim, I can‘t access the Creation Kit editor, or continue with work on the level. I’m going to have to wait for an update to the editor before I can continue.

So in the meantime, I’ve come up with a new experiment to test out.

I recently read a Gamasutra article entitled ‘Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts’. I talks about how people feel in different geometric environments, for instance people can feel uncomfortable in tight areas due to not being able to defend themselves. The main takeaway from the article, I felt, was idea of safety. People like to feel safe, and in a dangerous situation they will be drawn to areas that appear to be safe. How this applies to video games could be a bit complicated, as action based games use danger to excite players, and it could be said that an action game without the threat of dying would be boring. In that situation maybe players would be drawn to the danger more so than the safety?

But, by taking the idea of players being drawn to safety as a given, I want to see if the semantics of different materials can make people choose certain routes.

In this level, there is a series of floating islands connected by bridges. Some are made of wood, some are metal, and some have barriers and some don’t. At the moment, the different islands are at different heights, which is something else I took from the article. It mentions higher areas feeling more dangerous, unless they have barriers preventing players from falling off, where they become advantage points. I’m going to be taking the height out of the final map, as the islands are floating. It won’t matter how high the player is, if they fall off they’ll still die, so the threat will be the same no matter what the height is.

I’m also going to test the map with and without enemies. These will shoot and be shot at the by player. I want to see if the player still takes notice of aesthetics and thus semantics of the level if they are given task while also being put into danger.