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

[tofu]

Perhaps some subtle things you didn't know about how Valve guide their players through levels... I definitely didn't clue on to the birds (not sure if it's present in HL2 and Ep1? I haven't played through EP2 yet).

http://gangles.ca/2009/05/26/guiding-the-eye/

[Sentura]

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.

[tofu]

Can you recall any interesting links/presentations relating to the subject?

I think the birds are a good example, in cases where you feel they may not be strong enough alone, there are other subtleties to pull from.

[Sentura]

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).

[-HP-]

A whole lot of logic as well.

[Jetsetlemming]

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.

[Sentura]

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

[Taylor]

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.

[Pampers]

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

[Sentura]

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

[tofu]

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 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.

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).

I didn't clue on to them, but I can't say they never helped guide me through the level as I don't specifically remember anytime where I was like 'oh! the birds are leading me here'. Perhaps they did so subconsciously? In which case, they did their job - as they probably have done for X amount of playtesters Valve used this technique on before releasing it to the masses. Kudos to them if they managed to make an experienced game developer not take notice of their use.

Breaking away from subtlety, Splinter Cell: Conviction is using some new stylistic approaches to informing the player of the games state and objectives. Really dig the video overlays for interrogations: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-09 ... cell/50973

[2d-chris]

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.

[Jetsetlemming]

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.

[Sentura]

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.

[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.