Playing with Fire Without Being Burned

Building PwF Fields Like A Master
One of Play With Fire's Level Designers Explains How to Use the Level Editor and Make Your Own

by Patrick Dugan

Table Of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Field Design Styles
3. Customizing Objects and Shaders
4. Emergent Destruction

Introduction

So, you've played with some fire. You might even have scored some gold medals and beaten all the Hell fields. Congratulations! You're the sort of skillful pyromaniac your parents feared you'd become. But there's a big difference between annihilating pre-made structures and building new ones laden with clever puzzles, timing traps, or whimsical unraveling. The latter requires the use of Play With Fire’s level editor, but using the editor is easier than you might think. In fact, it’s as easy as looking in the Bin directory of your Play With Fire install, sparking up the level editor program, importing a library, and dropping objects like flammable Lego bricks onto your custom level. Getting started is painless, but building your masterwork takes something unusual, a love of creation combined with an appetite for destruction.

FIERY SERPENT: Burning everything in order can leave you without a block to jump from, as in the "SnakeParadox" level.

Field Design Styles

There are many ways to craft any given item, and a game level is no different. Personally, I tend to build small esoteric fields like “Snufalufagus” or “WillWright,” or big ambitious monstrosities like “ABetterMousetrap.” Maurizio, another major contributor, started labeling his fields with women's names, and tended to make compact, quirky contraption-heavy levels, like odd doilies sold by a Haitian witch doctor in a mosquito-infested bazaar. Chris, the lead designer and producer, worked asymmetric paths and elegant concept stages, like an architect reveling in the demolition of his projects. Ian, a.k.a. RodeoClown, played with different representational themes: an amp stolen from Spinal Tapp, a WWI aerial battle, Mario-style platforms and Indiana Jones excursions.

I've heard fiction editors describe voice as the defining quality that separates undergraduate potheads from undergrad potheads with a future in creative writing. Voice is an undeniable sense that you are the distinct author of a piece of work. Though we don’t usually hear much about “voice” with regard to game design, it is something the designer should experiment with and strive to convey. I think the simplicity of Play With Fire's mechanics allows a designer's voice to shine through. Your goal in messing with the level editor can vary, but whether you're trying to impress your friends, make the levels you want to play, or build a portfolio to land that level designer job you've always dreamed of, you should aspire to design with voice, rather than merely vomiting objects in random formations. Of course, vomiting random objects might be your thing. It worked for me when I made Alea, so why not?

Here are some design styles that might bring out your personal voice.

Destructible Playground

This one is simple enough, you throw out a few trees, houses, cars, or completely abstract objects. Then, you let the player go to town. The exit is usually in plain sight or hidden in an elementary way. As a result, the depth comes from maximizing the spatial paths of the playground to get a high combo value. Examples of representational playgrounds include “Town,” “Grail,” and “Rhiannon,” while the wacky ones include “Snufalufagus,” “WillWright,” and “HarmfulWhenSwallowed.”

Trail Blazing

In exploration-based play, the engine is hidden (or distant) and requires the player to burn through the environment in order to locate it. We didn't really implement this in depth because it is simply so time consuming to build such a level. A close example is “Amazed,” where the level is a maze-like playground and you have to explore the environment to reach it, but the difficulty involved is very low. “Amazed” took me approximately five hours or so to build and it isn't really that big. This sort of field is only recommended as a project for the hardcore architect.

Revelation By Flame

Appearance is a self-explanatory field that best illustrates the “Revelation”-type level. You set up a system of fuses, typically next to the starting point, so that the fire sprawls out in an interesting or beautiful pattern. In turn, the fire changes the physical set-up to reveal the exit. Combo scores are usually hard not to max out, so this sort of field is really a one-shot pony better left for introducing the game to people.

Light Show

A more mature version of the “Revelation” level, this type of level requires one to proactively light a large structure, often to spectacular effect where all the blocks in the level burn at once. Good examples are “SayItWithLetters” or “CorporateVandalism.”

Puzzle Design Styles

Burn That Mother Down

In this puzzle style, the exit is propped in a way that the fireball can't reach it, no matter how high it gets. Thus, the structure supporting it must be totally razed. “HighAltar” is a fairly basic example.

Burn Yourself Up

This puzzle-style is a "vertical maze" where the player must find different materials to get hotter, enabling him/her to to gain access to higher and higher regions of the field. “MyConfidentStructure” is a good example.

Right Light Location

A set of flammable materials is in reach of the fireball, but only a specific section is the "correct" place to start the fire, since the fire's spread won't be hot enough to start a chain reaction except from that location. A good example is “MoltenThrone,” where the exit is propped on top of a large metal structure with coals and wood stuck into its side, as well as an ivy growth of leaf blocks crawling along its side. Only by igniting the leaf at the right place can one turn the whole thing into an oozing volcano.

Order Of Inflammations

In this style, different sets of blocks are flammable, but must be ignited in the correct order in order to reach the exit. An example is one of the earliest puzzle levels in the core game, “ThanksForTheSupport,” which has the exit propped in a cage of stone on top of four weirdly shaped leaf pillars. Three of the pillars, if burned initially, will cause the blocks supporting the cage of stone to burn, trapping the exit within. It’s fairly easy to make a very forgiving field of this sort, but extremely difficult to make one that is demanding.

ARCH SUPPORTS: In “ThanksForTheSupport,” you have to burn down the support arches, but only have a moment to reach the exit before it is completely blocked.

As such, not many of this sort were made for the original release. A much trickier example is “OutOfTheBox,” where the player must find their way out of a box (hmmm) without igniting the leaf pillars that support the top. The player must ignite materials in the box in order to escape. The trick is that some of these ignitable materials may lead to the main support being destroyed and trapping the player inside. Fortunately, there are a few ways the player can escape in time.

Too Hot To Trot

This puzzle type features a field where its possible to achieve a certain level of heat, but doing so makes completing the field impossible, or at least more difficult. “AbridgeTooShort” is the prime example of this type. The solution I had in mind while building it involved melting the bridge at orange hot level. Then, I would burn the trunk of the nearby tree; and then, I would use a branch propped up by the melted plastic as a jumping point. In this way, one could just barely reach the exit. It turned out to have three other solutions, because game design is unpredictable like that, so if you could design a puzzle field where heat is a detriment, you must be very smart.

Types of Challenge

Beat The Heat

This classic challenge field involves a mechanism where the player’s progress ignites fires which, if given enough time, would thwart the player’s progress. It sounds like a paradox but its really simple, the player ends up racing against the flame. “Race, Bridges, ElTrain, Ico,” and a bunch of other levels fall into this category.

Platform Parching

The player must ascend laterally, but in doing so the platform itself becomes hot enough to ignite the materials serving as the building blocks for allowing said ascent. Basically, this is the lateral analogue to the “Beat The Heat” type field, but with the important distinction that time isn't always a factor. “RaceToTheTop” exemplifies when time is a factor, while “Platformer” is an example where time isn't important, just the player's maneuvering.

Hot Jump Marathon

"Hot jumping" is what we called an emergent phenomena which was at first going to be nixed, but which we ended up keeping because it makes the game more forgiving and a bit more interesting. Basically, you can jump again just as you land on a block but before it burns, resulting in a "hot jump". The “Kinjutsu” and “SupaKinjutsuBonzai!” fields are based entirely off of this mechanic, requiring the player to bound up through pillars of melting plastic and metal, like some kind of lava ninja, in order to reach the exit. This style is much worth mixing in with other styles and forms.

Customizing Objects And Shaders

The process of actually building levels is pretty simple, but not totally simple. There are two editors, an object editor and a level editor. The object editor creates and edits .fof files, which stands for "fireball object file". The level editor takes at least one .fof and lets you create and edit .fsf files, which stands for "fireball something files". Software development doesn't always keep consistent or end up making a lot of sense.

Both editors have two aspects, a tray you can use to load/create object libraries and scroll through the objects you either create (in the object editor) or place (in the level editor); and a blank space. In the blank space is a checkerboard denoting the ground plane and a red cubic cursor you can move with the arrow keys. A,S,W, and D move the cursor in the cardinal directions, F and G move the cursor up and down. Space places a block or object where the cursor is located. If you create an object in the object editor that is displaced from the center of the checkerboard, that displacement will occur in placing that object in the level editor relative to the position of the cursor. If you build a simple pillar, but it’s three squares to the left of the center of the object editor's checkerboard, it will always drop three squares to the left of the cursor in the level editor.

Making objects with more than 25 blocks will cause slow-downs on most computers. Placing objects over each other will cause slow-down as well.

Wow, it feels good to get past the technical part and into wonderland.

You can get wacky abstract with your custom objects. They can laugh in the face of gravity and give the finger to structural architecture. All you have to do is place one anchor block at the bottom-most square level, and rest that block on another object in the level editor. Then, you can design any crazy floating zing-zang you want. Floating blocks make for really interesting Fun levels, complex Puzzle levels, and vertically, uh, challenging Challenge levels.

You can also edit the textures and shaders of specific blocks in specific object files. Nine sliders are yours to twiddle with, allowing you to mess with the color of a block (ever want purple leaf blocks? orange coal?) as well as two others that adjust brightness and reflectivity (I considered making a level called "APlaceInTheSun" with extremely bright and reflective Magic blocks, but I figured it'd be too excruciating to enjoy). You can also import your own textures, which is what made the “Gaza” and “Cheops” levels so interesting with their hieroglyphic laced interiors.

Emergent Destruction

In the medium of game design, content is ultimately judged not by its novelty, its appeal, or even its pacing, but by its durability. In Play With Fire, the best levels are the ones you can come back to after playing them through a dozen times and still push yourself to get a higher combo score.

The only way to maximize the combinatorial depth of your levels is to play the hell out of them and look for subtle changes, a pillar here, a fuse line there, that would increase the potential combos people might mix up. It’s emergent play, essentially emergent destruction, but nurturing your rough draft design into a really raze-able playground requires attention to detail and persistent play testing. For instance, in the haphazard mess of an action portrait that I call “Alea” (the level where all kinds of different objects just fall out of the sky) I realized after about a dozen plays that a fuse of metal would increase the potential combo score by at least a hundred, and greatly constrain the timing needed to achieve that score. The result is one of the hardest levels in the game to get a gold medal on, and there was no formula to achieve that. Other tweaks might include setting up structures made out of metal and plastic, which fall when they burn, to allow the player to set fires remotely. Building content is a craft, perfecting that content is an art.