I’ve finally held the lecture mentioned in my last post. I was pretty happy with the results and since I wanted to share the slides with my readers I’ve just uploaded them to slideshare. You can download them from there or browse them here.
The slides are released for personal use only copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. If you have questions, need further information or plan to use the presentation for anything other than personal use, please get in touch with me.
Martin
I came upon you blog while doing some research. I am learning to be a games designer myself at University. I found this post with the slides very helpful and insightful with regards storytelling and level design to create a meaningful experience for the player. I find that a lot of games these days spoon feed too much of the story to the player, which makes the game uninteresting in my opinion and I would be better off reading a book. They seem to separate the story line and level design when they should really be going hand in hand with one another. Most of the really good games I find are the ones where the world they create for the player is rich with atmosphere with the story being partially (if not all) told via the level design which can really help with the dramatic elements of the game. Also being led or directed in a game without knowing or realising you are being led is one of the traits of excellent level desing. Fallout 3 and Bioshock in my opinion really shined with their level design with regards to relaying a story to the player and helping them navigate. I feel that environments and level design in games are my weak point at the moment and I am looking forward to reading more of you insights on the matter. Keep up the good work
Raf
Hey Raf, thanks for the kind words and I’m glad you found my slides helpful.