Need feedback for a TPS' Level Design Thesis

[TheOnlyDoubleF]

Hello everybody,

 

I'm studying game design and level design at Supinfogame France (it's the first game design french school created 12 years ago). I'm in third year and I have to write a sort of thesis to validate this school year. 

 

I've decided to talk about the "difficulties" of working on level design for cooperative campaign in Third Person Shooters.  "Cooperative campaign for TPS : the challenge of the level designers". Why ? Because I really love Third person shooters and I think it could be really interesting to talk about it, rather than making an umpteeth analysis of FPS's level design flow. And coop because it includes more conditions to design the levels. And yes, I'm a big fan of Gears of War. Love you Cliff <3

 

Anyway, this is how I'm gonna plan my analysis :

 

Introduction

1. Level design Introduction

                Game Design : Definition

                Level Design : Definition

 

2. Third Person Shooter

                Gameplay mecanics

                Recurrent Level design elements

 

3. Designing a simple player level

                Intention

                Stakes

                Player's exeperience

 

4. Designing a cooperative level 

                4.1 Two players cooperation

                4.2 Four players cooperation

 

5. Interactions between the players           

 

6. Vers la perfection

Conclusion

 

I already have several foods for thought like the need to design maps that suit both one player than two or four players, or create separate paths to offer differents interactions between the players as Gears Of War does. 

 

The thing is, I don't have the experience of making an AAA coop TPS, so I try to get some feedbacks from persons who have worked on such projects. So, if some of you guys have worked on third person shooters with coop, It would be great to share you experience as level designer or even as game designer and talk about the problems you faced up and the solutions you found during the conception process and the production of your game. 

 

Sure, even if you don't explain all the details, it would be very helpful and interesting. Really, it would be awesome. 

Edited January 25, 2014 by TheOnlyDoubleF

[Em']

Why are you limiting yourself to TPS ? I think that there isn't much diffrences between the a coop like mario and a coop like gow... It could even be more interesting to see what are the requirements of coop design for a game like mario and for gears.

[Daze]

Agree with above post - there's certainly a lot of interesting things to look into here but I would either go specifically in the direction of differences/challenges between third person co-op and first person co-op, or simply between co-op and single player in general.

 

(Unless the end product is really just a design of the level and the paper listing your thoughts on the way. Which is of course also valid.)

[Sentura]

These things should be discussed with your supervisor and not with random people IMO. Get their approval before doing anything else.

[Sjonsson]

I think you should mention how Level Design and Game Design works together in terms of MDA, (Mechanics, Dynamics and Aestethics),here's an article on that: http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf

 

[TheOnlyDoubleF]

--Em--, I prefer to focus on a type of game with the same controls and camera. 

 

Sentura, don't worry about that, I've already with him about my subject and he totally agree.

Daze, I've thought about that, but  my supervisor told me to focus on one or on the other but make a choice. The thing is, we'll have to present our research in only 15 minutes in front of a jury so it has to be clear and easily understandable.

 

I'm confident in the relevance of my subject and I'm sure I can make something really interesting. 

 

And Thanks you Sjonsson, this article is really interesting.