The Hallway problem

If that's one problem that plagues a lot of level design for shooters, it's room - hallway - room - hallway level design. It's an easy trap to fall into; you need to connect these rooms some how right? I think you're going about it the wrong way entirely. Hallways may be a neccesary evil sometimes, that's no avoiding them - the question is what are you building? What type of game is it for? A linear sequence of events like CoD is going to be entirely built of hallways - that's a neccesity of the design itself. You can't have non-stop explosions and cinematic cutscenes going off whilst wandering an open environment.

I 'd like for you to endulge me and open up Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or any number of older shooters and actually count how many hallways you walk through. Take screenshots if you can; then I'd like you to go back through these screenshots, and delete any duplicates you see. Any areas from the same map that resemble each other enough that it could be considering a copy + paste job.

Duke Nukem 3D's E1L1

 What do you notice? There's no hallways in this map. There's connecting tissue, but even those aren't just rectangular halls. Sure it's a small map but you could take a picture of any part of the level and a Duke3D veteran would know exactly where you are. Now I'll show you a picture of one of my earlier levels.

Imagination World Episode 4 Alaska

Oof, there's a lot of hallways here. It was no wonder I struggled with mappers block. It's not *terrible*, as the hallways were all manually built, and there's even some slight variation in Z-height in some areas. The Rooms aren't all flat squares and have at least some shape to them. But it's still an awful lot of hallway. 

The biggest issue with this, by far, is that it's not cost-effective. Hallways ultimately take as much time as a room to build, and a player goes through it in seconds. You can't get good mileage out of a hallway. So you need to build more, and expand outwards - then you hit a bad loop where you're not sure where to take your map, as the creative juice has run out and despite all that building you've got about 3 minutes of actual gameplay - with most of that puncuated by hiking through halls. At worst you've just made the game into a tedious slog. There's atmosphere and slow-burn as you're slowly making your way through rooms, exploring and soaking in the atmosphere, and then there's pure tedium as you hold the W key down to try and get to where you need to go. And then you fall into the trap of trying to buy time, to justify all that effort, so you make the player go back through all your hallways to unlock that keycard door they saw at the beginning.

Here's a much better map by me, made somewhat recently:

Alien Armageddon Area 59

 

 

 

There's still a couple of linear hallways/sections, but compare that to the Alaska shot - Area 59 is one environment, connected and looping back around itself. The level doesn't take too long to beat, but there's only a small amount of backtracking comparitively. The player won't need to keep bringing up the map to remind themselves where the keycard slots are, each environment is different and far easier to memorise than what section of hallway that keycard was in.

I think an unspoken benefit of this design is that it's much easier to build for. When you stretch off a hallway and build a new room, in a way you're starting from scratch, unless you copy + paste (which then leads to the equally bad problem of everywhere looking the same) As much as it depends on the game you're building, or perhaps even the plot of the game itself, I believe a hallmark of good retro shooter design is in these tightly interconnected levels. I'd go into varying height levels but I feel that's a whole another post in of itself.