Level Naming - Surprisingly Easy To Get Wrong...

A long time ago I was given some good advice by a jolly Swedish gentleman whose name I wish I could recall.

I was working for a company called Warthog at the time and he worked for 42-Bit, which Warthog either owned or was about to own.

He warned me of the dangers of naming levels using only numbers, e.g. Level 1, Level 2, etc, or even the slightly more complicated level/sub-level system of Level 1-1, Level 1-2, etc. His point being that these names were great until you decided to switch levels around, add new ones or chop some out.

It was good advice.

I promptly ignored it. In the previous couple of years I'd worked on a couple of games with plenty of levels and there'd been no problems. So, like, yeah, whatever, wise Swedish dude, I'm just gonna carry on with it my way. 

I was missing the point by an epic margin. Although, in fairness to my foolish idiot younger self, I had had made a few games by that point, and they hadn't been shy of a level or two. Those projects had worked out fine, at least with the level names, but I didn't know then that that was mostly down to luck.

On the project in question it proved little of a problem either. As time went on the number of levels in the game was persistently reduced, because of time pressures. That said, every time that happened the producer made me increase the size of the levels that were left. Nope, didn't make any sense to me at the time, still doesn't now. The jumbo levels even ran slower in the editor, making everything take longer.

The years went by and level naming didn't cut across my path much, or at least nothing went horribly wrong.

Then I was working on a platform game and it reared up and whacked me in the face like a stood on garden rake. I should have seen it coming really. We'd done the right thing my having a file that defined the running order of the levels, making it easy to switch their order, but the levels themselves were simply called Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Le-- I reckon you've got the gist of this system by now. 

Somewhere along the line we switched Level 7 with Level 8, or was it 6 with 7? I doubt it matters much. Easily done, as a mechanism, I just had to switch the two around in the text file. But the fallout was lunacy - we'd have conversations like this:

1: There's a bug in Level 7.
2: Is that level 7 as it appears in the game or the file Level 7.
1: Level 7 as it appears in the game.
2: So which level file do I need to edit?
1: Level 8.

Over and over and over again. I'm sure we changed the name of the file at some point, but that just made it confusing in a whole new way. 

The wisdom finally sank in.

Since then I have been mindful to remove any indication of running order from any naming convention. Sometimes other (smarter) people are way ahead of me. On Shatter the producer had us name all levels by a convention which contained our initials (everyone on the team was encouraged to make levels) and where it came in the list of all the levels we'd made.

But instead of using numbers for the second part, we used letters. So the 26th level made by me was called JBAZ, the first two letters being my intials, the last letter being the 26th letter of the alphabet. My 27th creation would have been JBBZ, with the 3rd letter being incremented for the next batch of 26 levels after the 26th. Not that anyone ever bothered to decipher the number, which was the point.

But on my most recent project, the cheekily named Alien Avian Attack (just asking for trouble with initials like AAA) I chose a more idiosynchratic path. At first I went with fairly descriptive names, ones that described different attack strategies or patterns, like Medusa's Hairdoo - thus named because the attacks follow the pattern of how I imagine Medusa's snake-like hair would attack you, if you hadn't already been turned to stone, of course.

Then I started to dedicate messages to people and events with names like Rocket Man, which is dedicated to Yuri Gagarin, as it was the 50th anniversary of his flight during the making of the game. All the harder levels were named after aircraft, Starfighter being a particularly apt one.

Alien Avian Attack - available now on Android and the only game I know of with a level called Grimethorpe...

However, it was when it was decided to expand the total number of levels per difficulty setting that the names became most distinguished. I wanted to be able to identify these additions throughout the listing as quickly as possible, so I named them after places in my native Yorkshire. The fact that there's a level in there called Grimethorpe will never cease to amuse me.

There are many cock-ups in game design that you have to make for yourself, you simply can't always learn from other people's mistakes. But this is not one of those times - never ever use numbers in your level naming if you can help it. And if you can't help it then drop me a line, because I want to know why not.