Stupid level design

Game Play & Game Design
#1

With level design, its always possible to do something stupid, how far do you go to prevent a random level designer doing something that’ll cause weird results?

For Quix, I have a slanty upward slope. Now a dumb level designer (ie. me) can make this slope dissappear straight into a flat roof. The result being that the player can attempt to run straight into a place it just can’t fit, the collision freaks out and the player is left with his feet or his head in solid rock (ouch!).

I could (should?) code around this, detect such a situation and prevent it somehow (like preventing the player moving in the first place). But is it worth it? Theres always going to be something that a terminally stupid level designer can do, so where do you draw the line?

#2

Depends entirely who is going to be writing levels.

This kind of nastiness was prevalent in early id games, where they (deliberately or otherwise) assumed that only knowledgeable experts (i.e. id staff) would be creating levels - and then doom launched a new boom in 3rd party level designers (which were all horrible to use).

If, for instance, it’s a core aim of yours to get a thriving community of people writing and distributing their levels, then you should idiot-proof it. If you just want them to have the ability, and expect some to do it, you probably shouldn’t bother.

Or, of course, you can go to all the effort of making an almost idiot-proof editor and then not publishing it - like I did with survivor ;D (but in my defence we haven’t released a satisfactory version of survivor yet, and are working on the next release…)