Level Building and Navigation Flashcards
Types of Level Design:
Alley Type:
Description: Narrow, confined spaces focusing on tight gameplay and encounters.
Good Practices: Use lighting and sound for tension, balance difficulty, ensure smooth player navigation.
Path Type:
Description: Predetermined path with limited deviations, offering player choices.
Good Practices: Ensure a clear path, use visual cues, maintain a balanced pace.
Maze Type:
Description: Interconnected paths, secret places, gives a feeling of exploration.
Hub Type:
Description: Central hub connecting to smaller, focused areas, allowing player choices.
Good Practices: Ensure logical connections, provide variety in smaller areas, create a sense of progression.
Island Type / Open World:
Description: Expansive, non-linear environments with freedom to explore.
Good Practices: Design points of interest, maintain cohesion, provide meaningful rewards.
More Types of Levels:
Puzzle Levels:
Description: Challenges requiring problem-solving rather than combat skills.
Good Practices: Introduce mechanics gradually, provide clear feedback, avoid overly complex puzzles.
Vertical Levels:
Description: Emphasis on vertical movement and exploration.
Good Practices: Design interesting vertical spaces, use platforms creatively, provide complementing mechanics.
Sandbox Levels:
Description: Environments encouraging experimentation and creativity.
Good Practices: Provide tools for experimentation, reward creative solutions, balance freedom and guidance.
General Level Design Best Practices:
Affordance:
Practice: Provide smaller goals and interactable elements for the player.
Leading Lines:
Practice: Use trails or cues guiding players towards their objective.
Architecture, Play Space:
Practice: Add details, furnishings, and architecture for realism.
Denial and Reward:
Practice: Offer small rewards, progress indicators, or scenic views.
Good Starting Point:
Practice: Provide an easy-to-understand starting point with initial hints.
Boundaries:
Practice: Use subtle boundaries to combat confusion and prevent players from feeling lost.
Feedback:
Practice: Provide clear feedback on actions, successes, and failures.
Consistency:
Practice: Maintain a consistent visual and gameplay style for immersion.
Playtesting:
Practice: Regularly playtest with diverse groups for feedback and improvement.
Iteration:
Practice: Be ready to iterate based on player feedback and testing results.
Story Integration:
Practice: Integrate level design with the narrative for an enhanced gaming experience.
Examples of pathfinding algorithms. What does Unity use?
● Navmesh (Navigation Mesh): A navmesh is a key component in game development that facilitates pathfinding for characters and objects within a game environment. It is a 3D representation of the walkable surfaces in a game world, enabling characters to navigate around obstacles and reach their destinations efficiently. Unity uses navmeshes to implement pathfinding for game agents.
● Pathfinding Algorithm in Unity: Unity uses the A* (A-star) algorithm as its default pathfinding algorithm. A* is a widely-used and efficient algorithm for finding the shortest path between two points on a graph. It considers both the cost of reaching a particular node and a heuristic estimate of the remaining cost to the goal. A* is suitable for grid-based environments, making it a popular choice for many games.
What is important for a pathfinding algorithm for game development?
● Importance of Pathfinding Algorithm in Game Development: Several factors are crucial for a pathfinding algorithm in game development:
○ Efficiency: The algorithm should be computationally efficient to handle real-time demands in a game environment. A slow pathfinding algorithm can result in poor performance and negatively impact the gaming experience.
○ Accuracy: The algorithm should provide accurate and reliable paths, ensuring that characters and objects navigate smoothly and realistically through the game world.
○ Adaptability: The algorithm should be adaptable to different types of environments and scenarios. Game worlds can vary widely, so a flexible pathfinding algorithm can handle diverse terrains and obstacles.
○ Dynamic Environments: In many games, the environment may change dynamically. The pathfinding algorithm should be capable of adapting to these changes in real-time, allowing characters to respond appropriately to alterations in the game world.
○ Configurability: Game developers often need the ability to configure and fine-tune pathfinding parameters to suit the specific requirements of their games.
What is NavMesh
● NavMesh: short for Navigation Mesh, is a data structure that represents the walkable areas of a game environment. It is primarily used for pathfinding, which allows characters or objects to navigate through the scene intelligently, avoiding obstacles and reaching their destinations efficiently.
what components does NavMesh have?
● Components of a NavMesh in Unity include:
○ NavMesh Surface: This component is responsible for generating and updating the NavMesh based on the geometry of the scene. You typically place this component on objects that represent the ground or floor of your game environment.
○ NavMesh Agent: This component is attached to entities that need to navigate through the scene. It defines the parameters of the navigation, such as speed, acceleration, and stopping distance. The NavMesh Agent interacts with the NavMesh to find and follow a path to the destination.
○ NavMesh Obstacle: This component is used to mark dynamic obstacles in the scene. It allows moving objects to influence the NavMesh and for agents to dynamically avoid these obstacles.
Navmesh: Why do we bake it. Moving objects.
● Baking the NavMesh: refers to the process of precomputing navigation data for the walkable areas in your scene. This process involves calculating and storing information about the geometry of the environment so that runtime pathfinding can be more efficient. Baking is necessary because it allows Unity to optimize the pathfinding calculations and provides better performance during gameplay
● Moving objects: The NavMesh system in Unity can handle dynamic obstacles to some extent. If you have objects that move or change position during runtime, you can use the NavMesh Obstacle component to mark them as dynamic obstacles. The NavMesh system will then take these dynamic obstacles into account when calculating paths for the NavMesh Agents, allowing them to navigate around moving objects.
