Learning to Design on a Game-by-Game Basis

It should be clear by my portfolio up to this point that most of my level design experience comes from tinkering around with the Source Engine. Particularly Team Fortress 2 and the Half-Life series, (although I did not list my Half-Life 2 projects) and I would largely say that the communities surrounding these games are what taught me level design in the first place. TF2maps was an excellent community for me to learn from, and later on RunThinkShootLive and the Black Mesa steam workshop were excellent places for me to input single player experiments.

With my experience in Half-Life mapping, this taught me a very specific design philosophy. See, typically First Person Shooter level designs are divided into what I'd call the "two E's" Environment Centrism, and Encounter Centrism.

In Environment-Centric designs, the location is what is considered first. The level designer creates a specific environment and then decides on gameplay ideas that can come about within that environment.

Encounter-Centric designs are essentially the other way around. The level designer decides what challenge they want to put the player in, and then decide what environment facilitates that encounter.

Now of course, it's not quite that cut and dry. These philosophies can often bleed into each other, and frequently what happens, especially in more modern games, is a sort of half-and-half approach. Some parts of the level are done through Encounter-Centric means, others Environment-Centric. But every game, depending on their goals and how they are designed, will follow one of these ideas at their core.

The Half-Life series is one of the big innovators in pushing forward the potential strength of Environment-Centric level design. From fighting a helicopter on top of a hydro-electric dam, to escaping a police state through old, dilapidated canals. It's clear that the strength of these games is the sheer variety of highly immersive environments. This was the design theory that I followed when I first started mapping for single player games. While some of my earlier attempts were somewhat hit-and-miss by my current standards, (Emergency 17 in particular I feel suffered from a minor case of room-corridor-room syndrome) I would largely say I was fairly quickly able to grasp creating an immersive 3D space, especially after becoming familiar with mapping in Team Fortress 2.

Recently however, my sights have shifted slightly. My newer projects are being created in the Doom Engine, as I find that it's much easier to work with, has greater access to custom content, and also I can create a reasonably sized level over the course of a week or so, rather than several months. While I did muddle around with mapping in Doom a small amount beforehand, my first real project was UAC Pacific Northwest. While I did embrace the strength of Doom's looser level structure to a certain extent, I found some of my maps to be very weak in the challenge factor, and overall, individual encounters weren't especially fun. Combat felt basic. (This is worse in the first two levels)

This is because I was failing to understand that DOOM has a very Encounter-Centric design. There's a reason the series has gained a reputation for having industrial facilities that a real person would have no business ever actually trying to work in. This is because each area in Doom and Doom 2 was designed for their combat encounters first, with environmental details being a distant second. In order to remedy this, I created Phaser Foundry. This is a map that I very deliberately designed with an Encounter-Centric mindset, to test and see how well I could give a fair challenge to the player. I was essentially trying to get myself to un-learn a lot of the design philosophies Half-Life had taught me, because Doom simply doesn't work that way.
Now, since it's only been released but a few hours ago, I have yet to see the response on it, but I'm fairly confident that I did a decent job.

Going forward, I'm still going to work on UAC Pacific Northwest with a predominantly Environment-Centric mindset, although I will certainly be giving greater thought to individual combat encounters and how to challenge the player. I feel that with the 5 maps I've made so far, the pack has already cemented its own identity, so turning a hard left would be bizarre at this point. And besides, having a mappack that's more focused on immersion and environmental exploration isn't intrinsically a bad thing. After all, Doom has quite a few maps, we can have one pack that bends the rules a little.