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Connor Johnson
Level Design
Applying a Quantitative Framework to Affect Pacing in FPS Games
“ Ortega ’ s Maze ” is a standalone mod for Fallout 4 which enacts a Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment ( DDA ) model within the level . “ Ortega ’ s Maze ” is partitioned into five rooms and analyzes the player ’ s behavior in each room before creating the challenges and items in the next room . My hypothesis was that I could build a dynamic scripting system that would have the same effect on pacing as hand-tuned content does in First-Person Shooter ( FPS ) games . I set out to build this level by monitoring the player ’ s health , equipped weapon , and which items they interacted with .
I chose this project because I wanted a scripting challenge in Fallout 4 and because I wanted to develop a system that attempted to decouple itself from the level geometry .
Overall , I learned a lot about doing continuous adjustments versus discrete
adjustments , the effects of telling the player the difficulty was changing , and how to add flexibility to a somewhat rigid editor . Another takeaway was using affordances from the base game in building my DDA . During development , I had to re-evaluate where weapons and items were spawned because it was not consistent with the base game and thus confused players .
I think this study has two main use cases in the game industry . First , it tells us the importance of the Observer Effect . One should consider having a control group if they are informing the player of difficulty adjustments in real-time . Second , I think this study shows the value of being able to spawn items and enemies in a more randomized space , rather than handplacing each individual spawn node . I think focusing on that would allow the system to scale , potentially across an entire game .
34 LEVEL DESIGN