Guiding The Player's Eye: How Valve guide their players

i actually wrote a paper on this form of subtle guidance; how you can communicate with players without them consciously knowing. the birds may not have been the best example, although they should theoretically work. there are also the gestalt laws in human cognition - how people perceive and connect objects. there's pretty much an entire science devoted to just doing this.

just google/look for cognitive psychology in UI and game design. all of it is intuitive, so it should come as a second nature when creating a level. i devised a method for playing learning and working with puzzles myself, but you can easily do it by yourself.

i don't think the birds are a good example because i didn't personally notice them as guiding objects in any of the half life games; they're too subtle. you will want something that the player is sure to notice, not something that just goes by without notice (you said yourself you didn't notice them, which further proves my statement).

A whole lot of logic as well.

They missed a bunch of the stuff used in Left 4 Dead, too, like the lighting hints- players will always want to move from dark -> light, so that's the path they'll follow if there's a lit area that would otherwise be out of the way or nothing important looking.

they just talked about the specific occurrence of the birds in episode 2, not other games?

There's quite a few games that put birds everywhere down your path that shoot off when you get close. Usually crows and on something dead... They're not good for breadcruming though, because they're usually hard to make out and only trigger when the player is heading down the correct path already.

Having light spilling into the room works really well and catches the eye. Consistency in the vertical direction a player is moving also helps - so they're always going up or down in a section opposed to a mixture of the two.

if you saw the hunter and not the birds it still prolly did its job

yeah i never saw the hunter. that was my point.

Indeed some nice subtle ways of guiding the player, seems like the article isnt complete though? You can't rely on something so subtle - but with good leading, lighting and sound it all comes together.

In early 3d games it was pretty easy to tell where to go, becuase at a glance you can tell if a door's a wall texture or a real door, and what parts of the wall are movers because of the lightmap outline.

Quote from tofu

I was hoping you'd have a backlog of interesting articles you found along your way that you could share. Leading a player through an environment should be second nature to any level designer but the methods and extremes to which you have to implement them differ for every game. Things like the onscreen 'floating' objective point in Vegas and the world map in any open world, i.e. Far Cry 2 made our job a touch too easy.

the point of methods is to have a way of doing things regardless of which game you may be working with. if you work at an abstract level, you can pull whatever you have learned down on any game out there. if you have a method for linear shooter games, then you can use the same method in half-life, unchartered, call of duty etc.

besides, i don't have articles because i find them boring. there are very few people out there who are worth reading about or listen to. the best knowledge comes from within.

Guiding a player in a dark, alien place, where the player can move 360° (flying in zero-g) and doesn't have a map surely wasn't very easy in Crysis. Lightbeams, color coding, sounds and as many landmarks as possible - still some people got lost.

Quote from FrieChamp

- still some people got lost.

me, for example

back to the birds, I only noticed them in hl2-ravenholm, directly when you came into the chapter.. but in Ep2 I didn´t notice them at all

Quote from FrieChamp

Guiding a player in a dark, alien place, where the player can move 360° (flying in zero-g) and doesn't have a map surely wasn't very easy in Crysis. Lightbeams, color coding, sounds and as many landmarks as possible - still some people got lost.

I think the best solution for this I can think of is to just make the right paths big. Any path that's not the right path and there for an ammo cache or enemy spawn or whatever is small.

Did Crytek study Descent for those levels?

I always tried to look for the enemies and follow them, but they just spawned out of some random hatches along the way so they werent much help

Should have been more obvious with the colors or something, because the water thingie (although beautiful) it was frustrating.