For the next chapter in our blog series, we thought our readers
would be interested in taking a look at verticality and the role it plays
as a pillar of Hexopolis’s design. We hope you enjoy it.
Verticality in a nutshell
For anyone unfamiliar with it, verticality describes a game’s allowances for moving along the upright axis and the game design implications of those allowances. A game with high verticality might look like Dishonored 2, in which the player is constantly weaving through multi-storied buildings and jumping across rooftops. Games with little to no verticality include titles like such as The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Doom (1993). While Doom (1993) was praised at the time for its verticality and layered environment, this Bethesda article contains some interesting insight into how the game actually all took place on a single plane despite some visual trickery!
In simpler, less pretentious terms, verticality means you can go up and down. This kind of design opens up the opportunity for interesting scenarios in a medium that often puts its audience to the test with trials in spatial reasoning. Adding an extra dimension lets the designer weave the game’s various elements and mechanics across an additional plane, all of which opens up opportunities for them and their players to discover new gameplay implications. So by thinking vertically as you design your game, you’re likely to get more interesting gameplay out of fewer mechanics. Here’s a quick visual example with Arkane Studios’ Dishonored 2:
Image: polygon.com, Dishonored 2
We can see that there’s a lot going on in just this small corner of Dunwall. From our high point of elevation, we see guards down the road ready to spot us so they can alert their friends and swarm us. We can try to brute force our way through and take out the guards quickly, but the level is anything but linear, and we have other alternatives. Traversing to the balcony across lets us keep the drop on the guards from above, and if this is a an Arkane game, we know that at least one of those windows can be opened for us to cut through the building. We can also get into that building from the ground floor, or even go down those stairs by the boat passage to maybe find a hidden entrance. And if we want to go the full stealth route, we can always platform our way up onto the building in front of us and move stealthily across the roofs.
Dishonored 2 is just one game of many that uses vertical design to open its levels with more gameplay choices. That same vertical design can yield vastly different results depending on the game mechanics it meshes with and enrich your game in unique ways. With that being said:
Does your game need verticality?
Building your game environment to be vertical is a design choice, and the validity of that choice and how good of a fit it is for the game you’re making is going to vary depending on the rest of your game’s elements. Because verticality is usually implemented to expand your game’s possibilities and the choices available to players, it’s important for it not to feel like an afterthought.
Portal is an example of a game into which verticality is appropriately incorporated. After the designers created the titular central mechanic of portals, they figured that the height a player fell from into a portal would affect their momentum and therefore how fast they came out of the portal’s counterpart. In this case, verticality presented the opportunity to create new and interesting scenarios that would elevate the game’s core mechanic of portals and allow the player to explore their properties and consequences to the fullest. After all, one of the most memorable moments in the game for a lot of players is when they place a portal above and below themselves to find that they can create an infinite loop with only height, portals, and a dash of gravity. Not having these playful epiphanies would have been a loss for Portal and its use of verticality was therefore strongly justified.
Image: youtube.com, Portal infinite loop
A game that makes its vertical design feel like more of an add-on is Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. While the game encourages players to do reconnaissance on enemy bases from high ground before going in, I rarely found myself taking this security measure while playing. This is in part because of the arsenal of tools the game gives you for your missions. These thrown-in vantage points seem even less relevant once you’re able to bring a companion on your missions, many of who are able to run ahead of you through an enemy camp and scope out half of the base, all before you even lift a finger. Furthermore, the game’s central stealth mechanic makes some of the most interesting and suspenseful moments the ones in which you unexpectedly run into an unmarked enemy around a corner and are forced to react quickly. Taking these points into account, the vertical aspects of the game seem more like a formality than an essential piece of design and could likely be stripped from it.
A final example worth looking at is F-Zero (1990), a game with no verticality or any need for it whatsoever. In fact, it makes sense for the game’s intentions. It’s first-and-foremost a racing games, and that means that the designers want to make it very difficult for you not to bump into things. If players were given more opportunities to drive at different levels of elevation, they’d lose those intense moments of drivers knocking each other back and forth across the pixelated lanes and bouncing around like pinballs. Those moments are possible because of the very lack of verticality that keeps all of the players on the same plane. It is a level playing field in the least figurative sense.
Image: nintendolife.com, F-Zero (1990)
2. Contrast is everything
Verticality isn’t so much about height as it is about contrast. Instead of your game being flat, every above has a below, and your role as a designer is to make it interesting to get from that above to that below and vice versa.
Let’s go back to our earlier example with Dishonored 2. That image shown at the top of this article has a height difference of 50+ feet from its highest point to its lowest point, and this contrast isn’t simply a big trench that the player has to avoid falling into. On the contrary, there’s several points that are accessible across this range of elevations, and many of them interconnect somewhere along the way, either in the form of stairs or elevators or jumping/teleporting abilities (more on that in a bit). To take things home, Arkane crafts their environments to change drastically in character and mechanics depending on where you find yourself elevation-wise. For example, the lower floors of a building are typically crawling with guards, while levels higher up leave you more alone and freer to to explore, and underground levels are often abandoned and serve as shortcuts more than anything. All of this creates noticeable differences between areas of the level based on their heights, layering them all on top of one another to create a strong sense for the game’s verticality.
In Hexopolis, contrast builds up over the course of the game as players stack at rising elevations and holds strong implications over the gameplay. Because a player can defeat their opponent by jumping on them from higher ground, the player at a higher altitude faces no immediate threats. However, the fact that they need to build a tower of the same level or higher in order to expand outwards means that it’ll cost them a lot more cells if they find themselves cornered and need to make a quick escape. On the other hand, a player at a lower level will be far more vulnerable but can easily expand in several directions all at once for a relatively low cost. This contrast, additionally to providing Hexopolis’s geometric skyline aesthetic, also serves as the fulcrum for the game’s different play styles. The different advantages and disadvantages found at each level of the game’s multi-storied towers keeps players on the move in a constant back-and-forth of competitive construction.
Image: An endgame in Hexopolis. This board has towers ranging from levels 1-11.
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3. Verticality as a language
An important step to implementing your game’s vertical design is to use that verticality as a way to organize information. Once contrast has been established between the high points and the low points in your game’s environment, it’s worth giving some thought to how your game transmits information to the player about that contrast. In other words, what can your player expect to change as they move from one point of elevation to another?
In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, height is directly correlated with cold. This is useful when it comes to things such as finding specific items. For example a player knows that if they’re looking for a Cold Darner, they likely have a long climb ahead of them into a snowy, elevated region of the map. Furthermore, this way of organizing information along the vertical plane allows the player to play with intentionality, because they’re able to use that information to plan appropriately, in this case by equipping themselves with garments and elixirs to protect themselves from the cold if they intend to climb past a certain elevation.
Image: gamedeveloper.com, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild paraglider
The type of information being transmitted can also be a lot simpler and more abstract. For instance, verticality can be used to communicate pacing and progression. In games such as Dark Souls III or Journey, many levels are loosely built around having the player attempt to reach a summit of some sort, and taking a look up or down will give them a quick idea of how far they’ve come and what distance they have left to travel. In Shadow of the Colossus for example, the player can usually expect to go upwards during a battle with one of the 16 titular colossi. As the player gains in height, the dynamic of the battle changes, with the player growing less frantic as they gain an increasing mastery over the colossus. Furthermore, the player can easily establish how close they are to the end goal based off of how far away they are from the head of the colossus.
4. Vertical Traversal
Building a vertical environment is only half of the equation. The second half is giving your players the tools they need to move vertically through that environment. While adding that extra dimension into your game opens up opportunities for interesting spatial reasoning, it also opens up opportunities for frustrating traversal, so you need push back on this front by ensuring that your player has what they need to move effectively across the vertical plane.
Taking a final look at Dishonored 2, the game’s environments, despite being intricate, contain large areas that are either difficult or impossible to access with walking, jumping, or even simple climbing. That’s why right off the bat, the game gives you either the the Far Reach ability if you decide to play as Emily (Corvo’s Blink ability has its own advantages, but he’s slightly more geared towards an aggressive style of gameplay than vertical movement). This lets you teleport in any direction within a few meters and immediately solves the game’s traversal problem in a novel, intriguing, and perhaps slightly janky Arkane fashion.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild goes a different route and gives you the paraglider. This is more important than the Revali’s Gale ability, which lets you shoot up to 10-20 meters upwards, because while Revali’s Gale makes upwards traversal easier, the paraglider makes downwards traversal possible. Not only that, it also incentivizes the upwards traversal by allowing the player to access the vast world much quicker and giving a new purpose to high points of elevation, since they allow you to jump off and travel faster than you would on foot. Its sequel goes even a step further with the Ascend ability, providing the player with an even more efficient means of upwards transportation across layers on the vertical plane.
When I was designing Hexopolis, it was tempting early on to add in a mechanic that would restrict players from moving to towers at higher elevations, but I quickly moved away from that idea. I was worried that moderating vertical traversal would make players more risk-averse and discourage them from building upwards in the first place. This in turn would have led to a narrower range of smaller, flatter boards and taken away from the game’s possibility space and replayability. In addition, players would have run into frustrating scenarios in which they found themselves trapped with no possibility to anticipate an escape ahead of time. In the end I decided against limiting upwards movement, because the point of the Hexopolis’s verticality wasn’t to restrict players, but to give them new and intriguing ways to play.
Thanks for reading our blog article! We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to catching up with you on our next blog post a month from now.
Sincerely,
The Hexopolis Team