Level with Me isn’t all niche structural deep-diving, though. “If you as the game designer think it’s pretty easy, when the player actually does it, it’s two or three times harder and more confusing and more complicated for the player.” “That goes down to this classic game design rule,” he explains.
Yang observes that some of the structure overlaps with a door behind it. In the most recent episode, he walked his viewers through Half-Life 2’s chapter 9a, “Entanglement.” Towards the start of the stream, he points out a Combine structure grafted to the side of a prison wall originally built by humans. The small decisions that Valve’s designers made are of particular interest to Yang. While most of the best known let’s players and Twitch streamers tackle games as a hobby, Yang’s design and programming background brings Level with Me to the status of a retrospective or postmortem. Through 28 episodes and counting, he’s guided viewers through the first two Half-Life games. Game developer and professor Robert Yang considers these questions and more in his let’s play series, Level With Me.
How did Valve get players engaged in the narrative without cutscenes? How do they signal which items are important and which are not? What does a building say about the people who created it? Some of the Half-Life series’ best and worst aspects are invisible to the average player.
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