Now, I know this approach won't work for all studios or situations, but all I gotta say is. It really works, and can often steer the level in the right direction and prevent us from investing too much time on the wrong objectives. Telling your fellow devs the van is arriving up top and pointing out where to secure loot can help you find out if a location is interesting for the escape or not.Д®ven though the artists might giggle, or people from the other teams walking by stop and wonder why they can't see that hoard of enemies. For example, knowing that you might have two escapes at either side of the map gives you enough knowledge to make pretend decisions. You can basically break down how your systems might work and try out a few possibilities. We'll move through the space and pretend to see guards or hack laptops and delay time based on things we expect to happen. It might sound crazy (and not everyone can get through it without laughing) but we'll have one of the designers act out the role of Bain, our mission giver, and just spout objectives at us. You might be asking, what if I don't have debug text or the ability to script? When playtesting levels for Payday 2, a lot of the time we'll get a simple block-out done and then. At such an early stage some floating debug text will do just fine. Most of the time you don't even need animations or even a model to properly test your ideas. The last thing you want to do is build an entire system and find out it sucks. Testing your objectives and complicated RNG elements has to be fast and efficient. Since 90% of Payday levels are hand scripted, it's important we don't waste time building the wrong things. Testing your ideas before scripting them? Wait. (This is a scripting example from our editor, each entity has it's own function) With our main objective in mind, we can construct a simple flow diagram for the heist and start to think about possible dynamic and RNG elements that can be used to create a re-playable experience. These numbers tend to get cut by a third, or in some cases, by half. It should be noted that this time assessment will change once the player has completed the level a few times. Breaking down our main objective into smaller sub-goals that could take about 2 minutes each (this is based on our extensive knowledge of payday 2). We decided to shoot for 10 - 15 minutes of gameplay. Keeping the objective simple and intuitive is important in multiplayer games where players can drop in and out of the experience at any point in time. The main objective was to infiltrate the depot and steal an EMP bomb. We decided that the theme of the level was a small train depot run by a group of mercenaries shipping large weapons. Making this decision early on helped us create better movement options for the player and focus our efforts towards balancing patrols and objective placement. For the short period of time given to us, we decided to stick to stealth only. There's a lot to go over, so letвЂ™s get started!Д«efore we start drawing or building layouts, we make the call if we are going to create a Loud level (combat only), Stealth level (avoid combat), or Mixed style map. The idea was to create a small heist that took around 10-15 minutes to finish with high replayability. Between the two of us, we figured out the scale of the project based on the needs of our studio. My partner took the role of Level Builder / Environment Artist and I took the role of Designer / Scripter. This map took 6 weeks to make between 2 people. I'll also break down how we consider using RNG (randomization), and the ways we apply it to objectives and mechanics to keep the level fresh and replayable. I'll start off by saying that Payday's stealth mechanics are not perfect and can be flawed in some areas, but I wanted to focus on the decisions behind the map design, specifically for the heist Murky Station.

The skill level of this article is for junior to mid-tier level designers, if you are a senior designer some of this article may sound familiar to you.

While parts of this article are specific problems and solutions for Payday level design, I made sure to discuss them in a broader sense. Today, I wanted to talk about my adventures designing stealth levels for Payday 2 before leaving Starbreeze in January 2018. With a thriving subreddit, it has consistently been in the top ten games played on steam.

It was released on Augand has since shipped over 50 DLC packs and counting. Payday 2 is a four player cooperative first-person shooter with RPG elements that centers around robbing banks and stealing rare loot.

Payday 2 difficulty mod