Feature: 'Designer's Notebook: Multi-Level Gameplay'

In one of today's main Gamasutra features, this month's Designer's Notebook features veteran columnist Adams' thoughts on multi-level game design, and sees him discussing video games with different gameplay modes, one of which is conceptually inside another. As Adams explains in his introduction to this entertaining column: "'Level' has to be the most overloaded word in the game development lexicon. We've got character levels, difficulty levels, level design, tech-tree levels, recursion levels in programming, and so on. Computer games are full of numbers, so almost anything with a quantitative value can be said to have a “level” of some kind or another." He goes on to note of multi-level games: "In war games, this idea is usually implemented as a global mode, in which the player makes strategic decisions about an entire campaign, and a local mode, in which the player fights a battle in a limited region of the overall game world. It doesn't have to be about war, though. In my game design workshops I often give people the challenge of designing a game about running the CIA. Many teams decide that running the CIA is a lot of boring political desk work, so they include a second mode as well that involves actually going out on missions." You can read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including plenty more on the intricacies of multi-level titles (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).