Making Hitman 2's Best Level

AGENT 47: Hello, Game Maker's Toolkit Something that I love about stealth games is the way they often have these large, open-ended levels. Stuff like Camp Omega in Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Or the various shifting mansions in Dishonored 2. Or the intricate Palisade Bank in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Unlike a lot of video game levels, which can feel like linear and claustrophobic theme park rides, these stealth stages feel more like real places.

You can scope them out from high-up vantage points, choose your route as you go, and deal with situations however you like. But no game does this quite like the Hitman series. The franchise is jam packed with memorable levels, like the opera house in Blood Money. The seaside town of Sapienza in Hitman 2016. Or the drug fields of Colombia in last year’s Hitman 2. Every single level is an intricately designed and fully explorable space, filled with people going about their business on clockwork routines.

You can enter almost every building, pick up dozens of objects, and disguise yourself as loads of different people. So, I’m left wondering - how, exactly, is a Hitman level designed? Well, to figure this out - let’s focus on a single level. And I’m going to pick the bombastic Florida-based racing mission from Hitman 2, called The Finish Line. Let’s zoom out and look at the Making of Miami. Of course, there’s only so much that I can tell you about the making of this level.

But I know a couple guys who can help… JAKOB: Yes, my name is Jakob Mikkelsen and I’m game director on Hitman 2. ESKIL: I’m Eskil, I’m the associate game director on Hitman 2 So I wanted to know where a Hitman level began. What’s the very first step taken when bringing one of these stages to life. JAKOB: So typically we brainstorm a lot of locations, and then it’s like “wouldn’t it be cool if… 47 went to a race,” “wouldn’t it be cool to do a fashion show,” “wouldn’t it be cool to do the streets of Mumbai with all the slums and all that stuff”.

So that’s kind of the originating idea. So this level is set during the Global Innovation Race: a sort of Formula 1-style race on the coast of Miami. Globe-trotting assassin Agent 47 can explore the food stands, the paddocks, and VIP lounges - all while a race speeds on around him. Developer IO Interactive liked this idea because games set at racing events always put you on the track - but this Hitman level would let you explore the areas you never normally get to explore: everything but the track, basically.

So, what’s next? JAKOB: Once we’ve settled on a location, we begin to develop the characters. In Miami it’s the Knoxes - how do they work in the mission? Miami has two targets for Agent 47 to assassinate: there’s a racing driver called Sierra Knox, and her father: the inventor Robert Knox. Robert Knox is what IO calls a “dweller” - he sticks to just one location. That’s his office building where, other than a tiny public showroom, the entire location requires strict security clearance.

IO calls that a “fortress”. If left to his own devices, Knox sticks to a pretty small loop. He visits the Android testing lab, looks out over the balcony, talks to some scientists, heads upstairs to his office, and so on. He simply repeats this loop over and over again. Sierra Knox, however, is a very different beast. For the first 20-odd minutes she’s driving around the race track in her car. There are ways to assassinate her while she’s driving, but she’ll also start a new routine, on foot, after the race ends.

Now she’ll bounce around the VIP area and, at this point, she’s more of a “roamer” - a target who walks around more public spaces. So that’s the location and the targets dreamt up. What’s next? JAKOB: And then we ask the question, the recurring question, “what could possibly go wrong here, and how can Agent 47 get a grip on the situation, how can he affect the situation?” So Robert Knox might be stuck in a predictable little loop, but that clockwork pattern can be disrupted in lots of different ways.

Mess with the air conditioning in his office, and he’ll go to the bathroom to use eyedrops - which you have hopefully poisoned. Turn off the satellite, and he’ll go to fix it - giving you a moment to boot him onto the track. Break his prized car, and he’ll come repair it - giving you a moment to.... whoops, sorry pal. You can even get him to leave the offices if you’re particularly smart. Each of these murders requires a bit of set-up.

You’ll need to find items, like poison for his eye drops or an octane booster to sabotage the car. You’ll need to visit various secure locations, like Knox’s heavily guarded office, and you’ll often need to wear a certain disguise. And IO can use this multi-step approach to tease you into more assassination possibilities. When you discover a military robot that uses facial recognition to pick out and kill targets, your mind lights up at the possibility of finding a photo of Robert Knox himself, to feed into the robot.

JAKOB: We invite you in, and we set up the moments in a way so you can take advantage. ESKIL: But you know this Mark, because you touched upon it so nicely in the Art of Repetition, where you talk about the gunpowder - and of course when you find the cannon there’s a tonne of gunpowder there so it’s not like oh I need it here. But it is just to nudge you, and to tell you “ooh, there is something else here”. And the exploding golf ball, it’s constantly giving you little promises.

And little temptations. Sierra has her own routines. When she’s on the track, you can of course shoot her as she drives down the straight, or sneak into the Kronstadt pit building and rig her car to explode. But there’s lots more ways to deal with her when she gets off the track. You can dress up as a Flamingo and boot her down a hatch. Kill her with a poisoned IV drip. Or off her during a drinking game. And at some point, you’ll probably figure out that there are multiple ways to kill Sierra while she’s on the podium - like being able to poison the champagne in the trophy, or rig the pyrotechnics to explode.

You might overhear this in a conversation... RACE OFFICIAL: You could fry everyone on stage if the pressure gets too high! Characters in Hitman tend have very useful conversations the moment Agent 47 is in earshot. It’s one of the few ways Hitman feels quite scripted and gamey, but it does give you that awesome feeling of overhearing useful information. You might also wander into the podium building while exploring, and see that you can poison the champagne - another little tease.

Or you might see the assassinations on the challenge list. These can be a bit spoilerific (though, you can turn them off) but they also give you even more hints at possible assassinations. But the really interesting thing is - by default, Sierra doesn’t win the race. She’ll come second, meaning she won’t visit the podium building at all. This adds a really cool wrinkle to the level. To get her to the podium, you either need to figure out how to help her win, or make her opponent - Moses Lee - lose.

There’s almost point and click-style problem solving going on, where you need to figure out what steps to take to get Sierra to win. Now IO went back and forth over whether Sierra should win or not, but ultimately decided to make her lose. JAKOB: Making it so that you can make the decision whether she wins or not - it puts you in power. I think that’s very Hitman-y. ESKIL: There’s a lot of teasing. We like to taunt our targets as well.

So now I’m gonna make her win, and then I’m gonna kill her. JAKOB: There’s poetic justice. Pulling off these kills often means waiting on the character’s schedules - the 5 or so minutes Robert Knox spends roaming Kronstadt, or the nearly 20 minutes Sierra takes to drive around. And this waiting is a double edged sword for IO. The schedules do make the world feel more alive. In most games, it feels like the world is designed specifically for the player, with bombastic events triggering perfectly for you to see them.

But in Hitman, the world marches on around you, indifferent to Agent 47’s existence until he pushes against the simulation. And these perfectly choreographed schedules do put more power into the player’s hands. JAKOB: If you know, as the player, that something will happen, then you can build a plan on that knowledge. If you know that, hey, the fashion show’s gonna end so Viktor Novikov’s gonna be on stage at some point.

If you know that up front, then you can make a plan for that and it will work. But they can also create headaches. ESKIL: Of course there’s the time aspect. You set some stuff in motion and now you know “oh god, that guy is...” You go into instinct and you just see this little red dot and you know this is gonna take forever. So we do actually have them sometimes running just to speed up. So, IO finds ways to deal with that.

The running characters are one way - another is a starting position that starts the mission with the race nearly over. And you can also find ways to speed things up yourself. JAKOB: So often we try to make situations where you can shortcut the entire thing. One example in Miami is that you can disqualify Moses Lee and end the race, and then getting Sierra on the stage. And you can also disqualify Sierra and get Moses on the stage.

So instead of trying to make it a thing that you have to wait for, or a limitation, then we try to turn it around and then make it something that you can also control to some degree. So that’s the high concept design. The location, the targets, and the dramatic moments. Now, let’s talk about the nitty gritty of the level design. So, Miami is basically split into two halves. On the one side is the stands, the food trucks, VIP bars, the paddocks, a medical tent, and a motel.

On the other is the multi-storey Kronstadt building, the podium building, and the marina. For the most part, you can see the left as Robert’s domain, and the right as Sierra’s. The two halves are separated by the track, where various racers are driving around. JAKOB: Having a race track that cuts your level in two is a really bad idea if you want to make a level where it’s easy to get from A to B. So the level designers spent quite a lot of time on finding as many ways to cross the track, spread all out throughout the level, up and down the track.

That’s why there’s two overhead walkways, and a number of subway passages that link up to an underground parking garage. Now, IO describes the design of some of the best Hitman levels as being a “snail house” with “Swiss cheese”. And i think the best way to explain these terms is to look to a place that should totally be a Hitman DLC level… IKEA. This Swedish furniture store tries to pack as much stuff into one location as possible, and - ideally - it wants you to look at everything.

So the store’s layout provides an obvious and easy-to-follow path that takes you from the living room stuff, through the kitchens, into the bedrooms, and through the children’s area before leading you - naturally - to the market hall and checkout. That’s the snail house. This Swiss cheese is all the holes between the rooms that create shortcuts - so seasoned IKEA veterans and staff members can bypass entire sections and get to where they’re going more easily.

In the world of Hitman, the snail house allows the designers to fit everything in to a tiny footprint. An entire race track that feels credible, with all the expected amenities and hundreds of NPCs can be squeezed into a tiny area that’s optimised to run on consoles. However, the area still feels pretty enormous because the windy pathways mean every major landmark takes considerable effort to get to. And IO guides you to those locations, using in-universe navigation like lines on the floor, helpful signs, and maps.

However, the Swiss cheese effect allows for dozens of secret ways to get to places more quickly. Fences you can scale, windows you can sneak through, elevator shafts you can climb, back doors that open onto new areas. These create tiny shortcuts between the major locations that give you a feeling of mastery as you find them. Where a novice hitman player is schlepping it from one side of the map to the other, a veteran player can almost teleport around the map.

Here’s another level design technique. JAKOB: We try to avoid dead ends. Though typically toilets are dead ends. But most other rooms actually have at least two exits. So you’re never stuck stuck. There might be some challenge or some things you have to overcome, but you’re never at a dead end where you have to turn around. Multiple exits also means multiple entrances. So the obvious way to get into the Kronstadt building is through the front door - but you can also enter via the parking lot, find a route via the podium building, walk through this door up on the walkway, and more.

This gives the player more options, and lets them feel like they’re making their own decisions - and not following a set, scripted path. With these locations designed, IO also thinks about how the disguise system will work. Hitman, of course, is a unique stealth franchise because the game isn’t really about hiding behind walls or in cardboard boxes: it’s about hiding in plain sight. So you can knock out a guard, take his uniform, and then wander about in the security offices without much worry.

In Miami, Agent 47 can freely explore the stands area and most of the Marina section unobstructed, as a member of the public. But he’ll need a VIP badge to access these areas. And he can only explore these areas when dressed up as a security guard. And it gets even more complex than that - you’ll need to be one of the Knox’s elite guards to get into the hotel area, and each racing paddock is locked off unless you’re dressed up in team colours.

But often in Hitman, areas are built in tiers of escalating security clearance. In the Kronstadt building, anyone can enter the lobby and visit the showroom. But you’ll need an IT guy uniform to explore the second floor, and a guard’s uniform to visit the top floor. JAKOB: When we design the level, early on we map out: what people would be working here? What kind of disguises would be great? And then we have to figure out how are they layered in terms of what gives you access to when.

And then also how early do you meet them in the level because if the first disguises you meet is the best one then we’re wasting a lot of gameplay for no reason. For the smaller moments in a level, IO actually learned a lot when making Hitman Absolution. This was a much more linear game in the series with more traditional stealth moments like needing to distract some guards who are standing in front of a door. For the more modern and open-ended Hitman games, these microscopic stealth moments are simply scattered all throughout the level.

So in the pit building for Moses Lee’s team, this engineer needs to be distracted, probably by messing with a generator. And getting to this guy in the medical area for one of Sierra’s challenges means dealing with this doctor, who can also be distracted by a nearby generator. And now, there’s one last thing to do. JAKOB: And then from that point on, we iterate like crazy. The more times we can actually boot up and start the level before we ship it, typically the better it gets.

We get smarter all the time. The developers definitely try to find moments that make the game too easy or too hard, and rearrange elements until it feels right. For example, they fixed a section in Paris in Hitman 2016 because Viktor Novikov was alone for too long, and became an easy kill. The designers also think about other challenges. Sniper Assassin requires IO to not giveaway the sight lines too easily. The challenge is often about luring a target into a good spot to take them out - not simply waiting around for the target to wander into the perfect location.

And suit only requires some more tinkering - but not much. JAKOB: Suit only is interesting because we don’t really have to do that much to actually make it work. No matter how hard we make this game, no matter how hard we make it, they will always find a way to beat it. ESKIL: I remember thinking that in the beginning: “this is impossible. There’s no way you could do suit only, and then I remember Jakob just saying “no, don’t worry…” And that’s a Hitman level!

But, these rules might not work for every stage. JAKOB: I’m personally very opposed to rules dictating how things should be, because then everything’s going to be the same. So I prefer that we use them as guidelines, because we need to challenge ourselves in this thing. Indeed, IO tries to make each level different, with different levels of verticality, different densities of people, different sizes. And even and thinks about them in terms of being in a chain.

So the mission before Miami - Night Call - is dark and claustrophobic. And the level after Miami - San Fortuna - has an enormous fortress that takes up most of the map, leaving agent 47 very few places he can explore safely. So the Hitman games have all sorts of level design techniques - and I think they can be applied to all sorts of games. This idea of characters moving on a schedule as a way to let players make plans, and make the world feel alive.

This IKEA-inspired language of snail houses and Swiss cheese. And the multiple tiers of safety. This is what makes Hitman levels so good, so replay-able, and so much fun to master. And I think lots of designers can learn from this. Hey, thanks for watching! And cheers to Jakob and Eskil for their time. All of my backers can watch the full interview, over on Patreon... ESKIL: This is crazy where the one game where you cannot drive a car, and the first thing we wanna do is show cars - is everybody gonna go “ooh, you can drive in the new game!”

Patrons on the behind-the-scenes tier also get a look at the process of making this episode. Special thanks to everyone who supports GMTK and keeps the show going, month after month!