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A game like Tetris I think is well within the means of anyone to dream up and pro-gram, and if it takes them a year to find just the perfect combination of rules that’sgoing to make it

very good, the story lines were kind of arbitrary and contrived, the characters andthe plot just didn’t stand up in terms of the kind of story that I would want to see in

a movie or a novel

So with Last Express I wanted to do a game that would have what I saw as the

qualities that were missing from most of the adventure games that were out there

So as a player, I guess I have to assume my share of the guilt for not supporting theadventure game market I think I underestimated the degree to which the gamesmarket had been stratified by the different genres You had people out there whosaw themselves as action game players, as strategy game players, as role-playinggame players, or as adventure game players I never shopped for games that way,but I guess over a period of a few years there in the early ’90s, even computer gamepublications started to stratify games according to genre So did publishers, so didshops, and I guess I didn’t see that coming

So you don’t have any ideas about why the adventure game market dried up?

Well, I can only look at my own experience as a player I enjoyed playingadventure games back in the Scott Adams days, and then I kind of got bored withthem I think adventure game makers need to stop asking, “Where did the marketgo?” I think the question is, “Why do people no longer find these games fun toplay?” Maybe it’s something about the games themselves

Your first two games, Karateka and Prince of Persia, were both solo efforts, where

you did all of the designing, writing, programming, and even drew the art How

do you compare working with a large team on Last Express to working by

yourself?

It’s a lot moreexciting andrewarding thanworking alone,because you havethe chance to workcollaborativelywith a large team

of talented peoplewho are really ded-icated and whoexcel in their ownspecialties It wasone of the mostthrilling experi-ences of my

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professional life The downside, of course, is that you spend all your time worryingabout where the next payroll is going to come from One thing that was really niceabout the old days was that the cost of developing a game was negligible Onceyou’d paid the two thousand dollars for the computer and you’ve got five blankfloppy disks, it was basically paid for Whereas with a large project there’s a lot ofpressure to meet budgets and schedules.

Computer games seem to be one of the only art forms that have shifted from being predominantly solo endeavors to being more collaborative efforts, at least for commercial titles How do you think that affects the final games?

It’s interesting What I’m doing right now, writing film screenplays, reminds memore of programming than any other activity I’ve done in a long time Like

programming, writing screenplays is basically a matter of closing the door behindyourself in a room with a computer and nothing else You’re trying to create some-thing from scratch If you write a screenplay that gets made into a movie, at thatpoint, like a modern computer game, you’ve got the whole circus, with highly spe-cialized, skilled people, and it’s a creative collaboration between hundreds or more,all of whom bring their own area of expertise A big-budget movie, for all the dailychaos of production, lives or dies on the strength of the script that was written,often, years before A modern game is a collaborative effort in the same way, on avery tight budget, with money being spent daily, usually with a publisher who’sbanking on being able to ship it by a certain date There again, what makes it work

or not is the strength of the concept, the initial vision, which usually predates thewhole production There’s just no time to change your mind on the fly during pro-duction about what the game should be

But that tends to limit what kind of game designer can be successful, doesn’t it? One who needs to make radical changes throughout the project to find the ideal gameplay would have been more successful in 1982 than now Now he wouldn’t

be working at all.

He just wouldn’t be working on a big-budget, multimillion-dollar production A

game like Tetris I think is well within the means of anyone to dream up and

pro-gram, and if it takes them a year to find just the perfect combination of rules that’sgoing to make it endlessly addictive, that’s fine, it’s not that expensive But youcan’t take on a project with the latest 3D engine and forty artists at your beck andcall and think that halfway through you’re going to get to say, “Oh, now I realizewhat this game really needs, I wish I’d thought of it a year ago.”

We’re at a pretty tough time in the industry I’m not sure it makes much senseeconomically to be a developer I think it kind of makes sense to be a publisher, buteven then there’s only room for a few This is a scary time because the number ofhits is small, but the size of those hits is bigger than ever If you’re a publisher with

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a Myst or a Tomb Raider that sells two or three million units, that’s great; your other

ten titles can be flops and you still survive But if you’re a small developer withonly one title in production, as Smoking Car was, you absolutely need to hit thejackpot Only a handful of titles each year sell upwards of half a million units, andthat’s the category you need to aspire to in order to justify the kind of budgets we’retalking about

And to make a game with Last Express’s production values you really need a

large budget?

I think on Last Express we stretched the budget quite far for what we actually

got up there on the screen We saved a lot of money; we got people to work for lessthan their usual salaries or to defer salaries, we didn’t spend a lot of money on thefilm shoot, we used a non-union cast and a non-union crew, and we didn’t have anybig names So we pretty much saved money everywhere we could think of And yet,just because of the nature of the project, the scale of the game, the number of peoplethat were involved, and how long it took, it ended up costing a lot

If you don’t mind telling, just how much did the game cost?

About five million

And the development took four years; was that your original intention?

It took two years longer than planned

What made it take so much longer than you thought?

Tool development was one To develop our own rotoscoping technology, wehad to do a lot of tests, different types of costumes, makeup, processing to get itlooking the way we wanted That was one And the 3D modeling; that model washuge, the train interior and exterior, and the number of rendered images was tremen-dous 3D modeling and rendering, animation, and tool development were the areasthat burst their boundaries The film shoot itself actually came in on schedule and

on budget; that was the easy part

So, looking back, do you wish you had managed to get the project done in a shorter amount of time, on a smaller budget? Or are you satisfied that that’s just how long was necessary?

Well, personally I took a bit of a bath on Last Express, financially So in that

sense, it probably wasn’t a smart move And I feel bad about our investors who alsohoped the game would sell half a million units, and were disappointed It’s kind oflike having purchased an extremely expensive lottery ticket

On the other hand, I’m proud of the game, I’m glad we did it, and I don’t think

we could have done it much cheaper than we did I’m happy with the finished game

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Of course, the ideal would have been to design a smaller game If at the beginning,we’d looked at things and said, “OK, this is going to take four years and cost fivemillion dollars,” there wouldn’t have been a publisher in the world that would havetouched it I wouldn’t have touched it myself! For better or worse, there’s a certainamount of willful self-delusion that most of us in the software industry indulge injust to get ourselves out of bed in the morning Even games that take two years todevelop often start out with the producer and the marketing department telling eachother that it can be done in a year and be out by Christmas The more technicallyambitious the project, the less you know what you’re getting into.

The film industry, by contrast, is relatively good at budgeting and schedulingshoots and doing them in just as long as they’re supposed to take The trade-offthere is that they’re not often trying things that are really new When they do, likeusing a new technology for the first time, or filming on location in a war-torn coun-try, or filming out at sea, they often experience the same kind of budget and

schedule overages that are common in computer games On Last Express, the whole

production hinged on our development of this new rotoscoping process, so to a tain extent, at the beginning when we said, “Yeah, we’ll develop it and it will take xmonths and cost this much,” we were basically operating on blind faith, going for-ward assuming that we could resolve whatever problems there were and that itwould work—which it did, eventually It’s very hard to make accurate time and cost

cer-projections when you are doing something for the first time On Last Express we

were doing maybe ten things that had never been done before, all at the same time.That was probably unwise

Overall, unrealistic planning is not a good thing for developers; it doesn’t reallyhelp us One of my regrets about this project was that we were under so much finan-cial strain from day to day that I was spending half my time worrying about thegame and half my time worrying about raising money That’s the situation I put us

in by undertaking such an ambitious project

Last Express is the first of your personal projects where you didn’t do any of the

programming Do you miss it at all?

One great thing about programming is that, when you’re really on a roll, youcan lock yourself in a room and have the satisfaction of making progress every day;it’s just you and the machine The times when I would miss that the most was usu-ally when I’d just spent two days in back-to-back meetings Why did these meetings

have to happen and why did I have to be in them? On Last Express, we had four

programmers working on the project, and although I often envied their lot, I had myhands more than full with the game design, script, artists and animators, casting anddirecting the actors on the voice recording and film shoot, working with the com-poser, sound designer, and editor, to list a few things that I actually enjoyed doing

At various points I did offer my services to the programmers, but since my last area

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of code expertise was in 6502 Assembly Language [on the Apple II] they decidedthey didn’t really need me.

Last Express is an extremely unique game in both setting and design In contrast,

most of the rest of the new games coming out seem to be set in either fantasy or science fiction settings, and are all based on last year’s big hit How do you feel about the industry’s trend toward “me too” games?

With the sional magnificentexception, I thinkyou’re right aboutthe majority ofgames I don’t know

occa-if the “me too” lem is primarily interms of setting Iguess I feel it more

prob-in terms of genres

You can take Doom,

and change the tures so that it’s anexpress train in 1914,but I don’t thinkthat’s really what theindustry needs What’s more interesting to me is experimenting with game designitself, how the game is constructed, what the player is actually doing, trying to cre-ate a new form that works That kind of experimentation was a lot easier to do whenthe publisher’s stock price wasn’t riding on the success or failure of the experiment.It’s definitely easier to get backing for something that’s a sequel or variation on aproven formula The harder it is to describe or explain something new, the fewerpeople or companies you’ll find who are willing to risk money on it I think it’sunfortunate, but I don’t know what to do about it It’s pretty much an inevitableresult of the cycle; when we go to the computer store as a shopper and look for thenext game, let’s be honest, what are we looking for? We’re more inclined to look atthings that are heavily promoted, that we’ve read about in magazines So titles thatcome out with little fanfare are going to have a harder time reaching the bigger mar-ket So in a sense, as a public, we’re getting what we asked for But as a gamedesigner, yeah, I do miss it

tex-My friends who make films for a living always used to say: “Oh boy, I reallyenvy you making computer games There you’ve got the chance to do somethingreally original While down here in Hollywood all they want are retreads of last

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The Last Express

year’s sequel.” It’s kind of interesting how the game industry now has the same set

of problems that filmmakers have been complaining about for years Maybe evenworse Along with bigger production values, bigger markets, and more glitzy awardceremonies, we’ve achieved a kind of genre paralysis, and it’s become more diffi-cult to break new ground

So you just feel frustrated more than anything.

I guess resigned I think every new art form goes through stages of its evolution.With computer games we’ve lived through the exciting early years, and now we’re

in the growing pains years This definitely doesn’t mean that innovation stops Even

in filmmaking, which is a hundred years old, every couple of years a film doescome out that, whether because of societal changes or technological changes, couldnot have been made a few years earlier, and is a valuable step forward It’s just thatyou have to weed out hundreds of clones and mediocre films to find those fewgems I think we’re in the same place with computer games Every year, out ofhundreds of new games, there’s a couple that push the envelope in a new and inter-esting way The best we can do is just keep trying to do that, and quit griping aboutthe glorious bygone early years, ’cause they’re over!

So how involved were you with the Prince of Persia 3D project?

My involvement was limited to giving them the go-ahead at the beginning, andoffering occasional advice and creative consultation along the way It was a

Broderbund project Andrew Pedersen, the producer, initiated it It was his baby Hebrought the team together and worked hard on it for two years So I can’t take creditfor that one

It’s very difficult to take a 2D game and make it work in 3D instead, with full freedom of movement for the player.

That’s the problem really When you convert Prince of Persia to 3D

over-the-shoulder, one problem is how do you keep the controls simple And theother is how does the player know what kind of environment he’s in Because youonly see what’s right in front of you A crude example is you’re running toward theedge of a chasm With a side view you can look at it and see if it’s a three-spacejump or a four-space jump and are you going to clear it or not If it’s too far, youknow there’s not even any point in trying Whereas in a 3D over-the-shoulder game,you don’t quite know how far it is until you try And even then, when you fall youwonder, “Was I not quite at the edge? Or did I not jump in quite the right direc-tion?” So it makes it a different kind of game You gain in terms of visceral

immediacy and, of course, the richness of the environment, but I think you losesomething in terms of a clean strategy

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So you don’t think that making every game 3D is necessarily the correct

finding new ways to present the action cinematically that will be as much fun as theold games but still have all the visual excitement of the new 3D games I think

there’s plenty of ground yet to cover Prince 3D had a few intriguing moments in it

that I’d like to see pushed much further to invent the next big thing in 3D actiongames

I read that you enjoyed Tomb Raider quite a bit That seemed to be an attempt to put Prince of Persia into a 3D environment in order to produce something new

and exciting.

I think the key word there is new Yes, I was really excited by Tomb Raider as a

player, because it was something that hadn’t been seen before But I think now thatthat’s been done, we can more clearly see the pros and the cons of that type of

game If you want to do Tomb Raider today, you need to find a way to go beyond

what they did in ’96 You can’t just do the same thing over and over

So did you come up with any good solutions to 3D-space navigation in Prince of Persia 3D?

For me, Prince of Persia 3D is a bit on the complex side, in terms of the

num-ber of weapons and the numnum-ber of moves It’s not the kind of game that I woulddesign for myself But they were aiming at a particular audience I think the coreaudience as they saw it were people who were a lot more hard-core gamers than I

was with the first Prince of Persia.

Do you find that your game designs change much over the course of a project?

With Karateka and Prince of Persia I had the luxury of letting the game evolve

over time, since it was just me in a room with a computer, with no budget and no

corporate bottom line I thought Prince of Persia would take a year and it ended up taking three, and that was OK—that was what it was Last Express was different

because it was such a large project With the machine that we constructed withhundreds of people and networked computers, every day was expensive, so chang-ing the design in midstream was not an option There I spent a lot more time at thebeginning trying to work out the game in detail You just have to pray that the origi-nal design is solid and doesn’t have severe flaws that will reveal themselves downthe line

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But your earlier games did change significantly over the course of their

development?

Oh yeah One example: Prince of Persia was originally not supposed to have

combat One of my bright ideas there was an answer to what I saw as the clichédviolence of computer games I wanted the player to be an unarmed innocent in ahostile world full of spikes and traps There would be lots of gory violence directedagainst the player, which it would be your job to avoid, but you would never actu-ally dish it out That was also a way of dealing with the fact that I didn’t think therewas enough computer memory to have another character running around on thescreen at the same time Luckily, I had stalwart friends who kept pushing me to addcombat When your friends tell you your game is boring, you’d better listen

Shadow Man, the character, was a serendipitous accident because I thought,

“There’s no way to add another character in there, we don’t have the memory forit.” Only if the character looked exactly like the Prince, if he used the same anima-tion frames I can’t remember who suggested it, but by shifting the character over

by one bit and then exclusive ORing with himself you got a black shape with ashimmery white outline So I tried that, and when I saw Shadow Man runningaround the screen I said, “Cool, there’s a new character.” So that suggested thewhole plot device of the mirror and jumping through the mirror and having an evilalter ego who would follow you around and try to thwart you by closing a gate thatyou wanted to be open, or by dropping things on your head And then there was theresolution, where you fight Shadow Man at the end, but you can’t kill him, sincehe’s yourself, and if you kill him you die So you have to find a way to solve that.Call it Jungian or what you will, it was a way to take advantage of the fact that wedidn’t have that much memory

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Prince of Persia

So later on you must have found some more memory so you could put in the other characters.

A lot of the time that goes into programming a game like Prince of Persia on a

computer like the Apple II is taking what you’ve done already and redoing it tomake it smaller and faster Eventually the stuff that was in there just got more effi-cient and left enough room to come up with a limited set of character shapes for theguards If you notice, there’s a lot that the guards can’t do They can’t run and jumpand chase you All they can do is fight

Your games have all been very visually appealing How did you balance the games’ visual appearance with the requirements of the gameplay?

I think along with what we already talked about with the simplicity of the trols and consistency of the interface, visuals are another component where it’soften tempting to compromise You think, “Well, we could put a menu bar acrosshere, we could put a number in the upper right-hand corner of the screen represent-ing how many potions you’ve drunk,” or something The easy solution is always to

con-do something that as a side effect is going to make the game look ugly So I took asone of the ground rules going in that the overall screen layout had to be pleasing,had to be strong and simple So that somebody who was not playing the game butwho walked into the room and saw someone else playing it would be struck by apleasing composition and could stop to watch for a minute, thinking, “This looksgood, this looks as if I’m watching a movie.” It really forces you as a designer tostruggle to find the best solution for things like inventory You can’t take the firstsolution that suggests itself, you have to try to solve it within the constraint that youset yourself

So what made you decide to stop working in games and pursue screenwriting full time?

I’ve always sort of alternated computer games and film projects I think there’s

a lot of value to recharging your creative batteries in a different industry Prince of Persia would not have been as rich if I hadn’t spent those couple of years after Karateka thinking and breathing film, writing a screenplay The same with Last Express That project came on the heels of doing a short documentary film in Cuba called Waiting for Dark So, I don’t know, never say never Maybe one day I’ll do

another game, but right now the challenge of writing a screenplay and getting agood film made is a lot more exciting to me than doing another computer game To

me a compelling project is one that you have to talk yourself out of pursuing, rather

than talk yourself into it

One thing, though, computer technology is evolving pretty fast A computergame now is so different from what a computer game was ten years ago, who’s tosay what we’ll be doing in ten years?

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So it’s not that you prefer working in a more linear form It’s more of an nate pursuit for you.

alter-It’s a different form, but a lot of the challenges are surprisingly similar With acomputer game, although it’s a non-linear means of telling a story, you still have thefascinating mystery of what is it about a particular world or a particular set of char-acters that makes that game thrilling and gripping What makes people say, “I want

to play this game, I want to be Mario,” and then look at another game that might betechnically just as good and say, “I have no interest in being this character in thisworld.” Same with a film There’s some mysterious chemistry between an audienceand a storyteller that causes the audience to decide, even based just on the trailer,whether or not they want to live this particular story

The two art forms are not all that dissimilar, when it comes to sitting down andwrestling with a set of elements and trying to get them into some kind of finiteshape The challenges of taking an established genre and breaking new ground with

it somehow, of making it surprising and suspenseful, of economically using the ments at your disposal, are very similar whether it’s a game or a film The hardest

ele-thing with Karateka and Prince of Persia was coming back to it day after day,

look-ing at somethlook-ing that had taken me a week to program and saylook-ing, “You knowwhat? I got it working, but now I have to throw it out and find something different.”Same with screenwriting You have to be willing to throw away your own workrepeatedly over the course of a long project, in order to arrive at that finite set ofelements that works just right

Jordan Mechner Gameography

Karateka, 1984 Prince of Persia, 1989 Prince of Persia 2, 1993 The Last Express, 1997 Prince of Persia 3D, 1999 (Consultant) This interview originally appeared in a different form in Inside Mac Games maga- zine, www.imgmagazine.com Used with permission.

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An integral part of developing a good game is creating compelling content for

that game In order to create superior content, the design team will need to

be equipped with well-designed, robust game creation tools Therefore, onecan conclude that designing a good game is about designing good game creationtools

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Other than the development environments the programmers use to compile thegame’s code, and the graphics packages the artists use to make the game’s art, themost commonly used game creation tool is the level editor What distinguishes thistool from the others I mentioned is that it is typically built specifically for a project

or, at least, for the engine the team is using to power the game It is the ity of the development team to make this level editor as powerful as it can be, tofacilitate the job of the level designers and allow them to make the best game-worldpossible

responsibil-Of course, not every game has levels Many of the classic arcade games from

the early 1980s such as Missile Command or Space Invaders do not have levels as

we think of them now And the games that did, such as Defender or Tempest,

cer-tainly did not require sophisticated level editors to create their game-worlds Games

like Civilization and SimCity auto-generate the basis of a level and then allow the

players and AI to build the rest themselves Sports titles have levels that are quitesimple and mostly require the construction of visually pleasing stadiums to sur-round the gameplay I discuss the nature of levels in games in more detail inChapter 21, “Level Design.” Many modern games employ sophisticated levels, lev-els which have a tremendous impact on the shape and form of the gameplay thattakes place on them These games demand that their development team create aneditor with which the level designers can build the game-world

Surprisingly, many development teams fail to invest enough programming time

in making their tools as good as possible Usually teams have no idea what is dard in other tools used in the industry Frequently, not enough time is invested in

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The simple levels

preplanning and thoroughly designing how a level editor will work As a result ofall of these factors, it is often many months before the level design tools are reason-able to use Frequently a programmer is stuck with implementing or improving thelevel editor as “extra” work on an already full schedule, and is forced to use thetrusty “code like hell” method of implementation to get it done in time Often, keytime-saving features are not added until midway through a project, by which timethe game’s designers are already hopelessly behind in their own work.

Desired Functionality

So what sort of functionality should a level editor include? Many might suggest animportant part of any level editor is having hot keys hooked up to all the importantfunctionality Others would recommend plenty of configurable settings which allowdifferent designers to turn on and off the features they prefer, when they need to usethem It goes without saying that a level editor should be stable enough that adesigner can use it for a number of hours without it locking up, but these sugges-tions are all the obvious ones, the bare minimum that an editor should do to beuseful What sorts of features should be included to allow an editor to truly shine,

to empower designers to do the best work possible?

Visualizing the Level

The most important objective for a world creation tool must be to allow the designer

to see the world he is creating while simultaneously enabling him to make tions to it This is often called What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) in thedomain of word processors and desktop publishing packages, but is not somethingthat level editors are universally good at I will call such a WYSIWYG view the

modifica-“player’s view” since it represents what players will see when they play the game.The world the designer is crafting should be seen in this player’s view windowusing the same rendering engine the game itself will employ, whether this means 2D

or 3D, sprites or models, software driven or hardware accelerated This seems to bethe most important feature of any level editor How can a designer hope to create agood looking world if he must first tweak the world’s settings in the editor and thenrun a separate application to see how it looks in the game?

The designer should be easily able to move the camera in this player’s view sothat he can quickly maneuver it to whatever section of the map he needs to see inorder to work on the level This movement is probably best accomplished with asimple “flight” mode where the player can control the camera’s position using sim-ple movement and turning keys In this mode the camera should move withoutcolliding with geometry or other game-world objects Though one may also want toprovide a mode for the player’s view where the designer can maneuver through the

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game-world as the player will in the final game, the editor should always allow thedesigner to move around the level unconstrained In order to finely edit a level, thedesigner must be able to look closely at whatever he wants without having to worrythat a tree blocks his way.

Every difference that exists in what the designer sees in the editor and what willshow up in the game will make the levels look that much worse Suppose the view

in the editor is only available using 3D hardware accelerated rendering, while thegame itself must run in a software mode in addition to hardware This will createfrustration for the designer, since he will not be able to easily tell how the level willappear in software Sure, the level looks great with acceleration, but aliasing in thelevel’s textures may be horrendous without the benefits of tri-linear filtering Cer-tainly having a hardware accelerated view in the editor makes sense since it willrun much faster than a software view and will thereby allow the designer to workfaster But for games that need to run with and without 3D cards, the editor should

be able to easily switch between an accelerated and unaccelerated view, so thedesigner can quickly and easily make sure the level looks good regardless of how it

popular Quake engine editing tool Worldcraft, which was used to create all the els in Half-Life, provides the player with the popular “tri-view” setup, with which

lev-the designer can see top-down (along lev-the Y axis), from one side (along lev-the X axis),and from another side (along the Z axis) simultaneously in three separate windows.The three side views appear in addition to a 3D “player’s view” window Havingmultiple views is of particular importance for editing complex, overlapping 3D

architecture, such as one finds in Quake levels In contrast to the player’s view

win-dow, which exists in order to show the designer exactly what the level will look like

in the game, the editing view’s purpose is to allow the designer to easily modifyand shape what he sees in the player’s view window Of course, the editor shouldallow editing views and a player’s view to be all up on the screen simultaneously,and the changes made in one window should be instantly reflected in all the views

In some cases there may not be a need for separate editor and player views For

instance, in a 2D world such as was found in my first game, Odyssey: The Legend

of Nemesis, the player’s view of the world may be perfectly suited to editing the

levels While I worked on the many levels for that game, not once did I wish for

another view of the game-world Similarly, in StarCraft, the representation of the

world as it appears in the game is sufficiently clear to allow the designer to make

modifications directly to it For this reason, the StarCraft Campaign Editor provides

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only a player’s view window for the designer to edit in However, for the StarCraft

editor, it might have been beneficial to provide a separate editing view Because ofthe isometric view the game uses, a view which can sometimes be confusing tolook at, a strictly top-down view in which the designer could edit her level couldhave been quite useful in the placing and manipulating of units and other game ele-

ments The StarCraft Campaign Editor does include a top-down “mini-map” of the

level being created, but the designer cannot actually change the level using thatview, nor is the mini-map large enough to allow for easy editing

The Big Picture

I have argued that it is important for a game’s level editor to allow the designer tosee the level exactly as she will see it in the final game, but the player’s viewwindow does not always need to represent exactly what the player will see It can

be quite useful if the level editor can also show the designer various extra tion about the level that will assist in that level’s creation For instance, supposethat the game being developed involves various monsters maneuvering the level onpredetermined paths Being able to see exactly where these paths go is key to under-standing how the level functions, and being able to see exactly where these pathslead in the world the player will be navigating is important to making sure the pathsare set up properly

informa-In many level editors, this sort of level functionality information is cated in the editing view but not in the player’s view, but it makes sense to display

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