Arkane Lyon, the creator of the Dishonored series and Deathloop, is a studio known for level design. Immersive sims run on the quality of their levels, of being playgrounds that offer you multiple routes and therefore gameplay choices about how to tackle them. They need to hold up to your curiosity and experimentation, while at the same time tell you a story without really seeming like they’re telling you a story. Frankly, it’s an art, and there aren’t many better at it than Arkane.
How does it do it? Let me introduce to you the hourglass principle. It’s a principle explained to me by Arkane’s level-making maestro Dana Nightingale, who’s now campaign director at the studio and working on, well, whatever the studio is working on now – she was tight-lipped about it. Redfall, remember, is being made at the other Arkane studio, Arkane Austin.
Dana Nightingale is known for being the mind behind the Clockwork Mansion in Dishonored 2, although she obviously had a lot of help; and she’s the person who fixed down the critical path in Deathloop – as in, who you have to kill and when – and helped work out how to track it all and present it to you. Given the time-looping nature of the game, that’s no small feat. In other words, Dana Nightingale knows her stuff.
And it’s she who tells me, in a podcast interview available everywhere now (and which covers a lot more besides) all about this hourglass idea. And it begins with, she says, something the studio has nicknamed “the white rabbit”.
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“This is the thing that catches the players attention,” she explains. “Whatever it is in the environment – either it’s a specific enemy, it’s something they want to go get, it’s a doorway, it’s a clue in the story – it’s what gets them on the right track.”