Right, I wrote two rants on level design. one about the future of the level design community and one on companies who split up level design
Im using this forum as a testing ground to see to see how other people and level designers think about it and react ont it before i might post it somewhere else.
Prolly creates some hot discussions
Some discussions have already taken place partially in the past.
Please correct me if Im wrong with the valve half life 2 contest example, I believe the thing I said was in the rules but im not sure.
Whatever the case, lets see what gives :
First
The future of the Level Design communityLevel design is becoming increasingly complex. The increasing polycounts and texture sizes as well as the introduction of materials and advanced shaders such as normal and parallax mapping are great for the quality of games but they also raise the difficulty level sharply. It is becoming more and more difficult for beginners to get a grip on level design as a whole. Level design is in the process of becoming too complex for the average joe. Every element of level design such as architecture or lighting is starting to require very specific skills and a lot more required time and effort making it only harder for beginners to start with it or even for intermediates to work on.
And that is endangering level design as a whole and especially the hobbyist level design community. Level design is going towards a situation where all user created level are made up out of nothing more than prefabs. Prefabs are bad. They may help your level but on the long term they are going to decrease the overall quality hugely. Not only will all the levels created look alike they will also prevent new people from learning some very important aspects of level design. Architecture will be forgotten, as will be texturing and materials and atmosphere, style and theme wont be up the designer to decide anymore as he can only use what he has available. A light version of Level Design would start to emerge, without some of those very important elements all there will be left are hundreds of standard looking environments.
This happened to a great extend when Half Life 2 was released. The first year most released levels all looked exactly like the game itself. Same textures, models, theme, and so on. While such levels might be interesting the first month you will get really bored with the theme after half a year and start ignoring the mod community.
All of that has wider consequences too. It is going to cause a brain drain in the community. The skilled and experienced people are going to leave after a while because hundreds of beginners who can do nothing more than placing prefabs in the same old style and feel while will be of little interest for them. Without that group of people a serious amount of skill will disappear from the community as well as the possibility for those beginners to get help on advanced subjects and learn from the older more experienced people. Which in its turn would lead to another decline in skill and quality.
People should be motivated to use new content to create their levels with if we want to try and minimize the effects of this. Motivation can be given trough contests, tutorials, correct reviews of levels, and so on. If people's effort of learning how to create custom content and using it does not give them an advantage they will stop doing it. Valve made that mistake for example. After Half Life 2 was launched they organized a level design contest of quite a lot of money. While that was good for their level design community the only problem was that custom content was not allowed. They were sending out the signal that using prefabs is good and can even pay off and that is exactly not what you want.
Relying too much on prefabs is going to cause long term problems and a strong decline in quality and skill. Which in turn could hurt companies behind games such as Valve. The modding communities are a huge potential employee farm for companies. Companies hire lots of people from modding communities because of the ever increasing demand for more employees. If the skill level and quality in the community lowers however it will be a lot harder for a company to find skilled people who truly understand what they are doing. And that again is going to hit back at the community. They will experience less chance and less attention to what they are doing.
The higher the overall quality and skill level the people in a community have the more outside interest they will create. And the other way around.
Second
Splitting Level design RantMore and more companies lately split level design in to multiple smaller aspects. Some only do this in a minor way by just splitting gameplay, sound and everything else over multiple people while others split everything they can resulting in different people for concept, geometry, texturing, lighting, gameplay, sound, special fx and so on. I am against that.
Level design is one of the most complex elements in a game. It is a combination of a wide range of different things such as architecture, materials and textures, lighting, gameplay, sound and special fx. It is that combination that makes it complex. You need to control every aspects on itself plus keeping the overview on the whole. All elements must be in harmony with the rest of the level. Making a good looking and well playing level isn't that easy. Any element in a level is directly and indirectly influenced by another. Any choice you make will influence the rest of the development. For example you cannot texture a world with blue textures when you intend to use lots of yellow lighting because those two do not match each other. The balance and harmony between every element is one of the most important and also most difficult things in a level.
It is exactly that very important balance that is running the danger of being destroyed or disturbed when too many people work on one level. Every person has his own opinion on something, they all have their own techniques and they all have their own desires and wishes for the level they are working on. Even if the lead or leads are directing their artists and designers greatly, and even if there is enough communication between everyone as it is still bound to go wrong at some point. You will always have someone somewhere who wants to add gameplay situation X when the next person is modeling the environment with his own interpretation of that gameplay in mind. No matter how well you communicate it is always bound to give some misunderstandings somewhere or worse: fights.
Imagine how bad it is when you have to work on a level that has been designed badly or when you have to light a building that looks really bad. No matter how well you try to do it, if the base is wrong you will never get it right anymore. And that is very frustrating. It is very frustrating to not being able to fix any of the other persons mistakes because after all you are not allowed to since you are only the lighter or the level artist and it is not considered your task to fix or question such mistakes.
And that brings us to the next point. Even if you would report that mistake or in general if you simply need anything from the other person concerning the level which could be anything like a specific model you are lacking, a gameplay aspect that is unclear or a pitch black corridor that urgently needs lighting you will likely have to wait days for it if not weeks. The person responsible for the lighting might be busy working on something else. Getting him to fix it would first require you to report the bug or problem to your lead who than would have to go ask or schedule the other guy in for that task.
Whatever the case, that process takes days or weeks and in any case a lot longer than if you were in control of everything and would be able to quickly fix up the problem yourself, something which would take less than five minutes in case of the corridor light.
Another problem is that most people that do one thing have little skill in other things. For example a gameplay designer is not an artist most of the times. He does not understand how art works, what is important in it or what to look out for. Yet exactly that person will lay out the base for the visuals ? The basic composition, the theme and setting of the environment and so on ? If a problem arises you are in for an hour long discussion simply to explain the other guy why you need thing a. or b. this way. Simply because the other guy does not has understanding of what you do. That is a huge time loss and it is simply plain frustrating. The problem would not arise if you would do everything yourself and if the other people who work on levels have equal understanding of things.
I have been in lots of situations where other people who work on levels have caused me a lot of frustration or time loss. Often I am given a gameplay design that makes little sense, such as a apartment building in the middle of a jungle or designs that are far from possible. Such as giant open fields with dozens of brand new assets to create while we are in a tight deadline or a design that wont let me add occluders in it anywhere or optimize. All of those are directly caused by people who do not understand the way everything works or the overall point of level design. They lost track of the overview.
Splitting level design can let you loose track of the overview. It slows down the whole process. It causes unnecessary frustrations and hour long discussions of trying to explain unartistic designers why certain things need to be changed in order for it to look cool or be made in a reasonable time frame. It makes you wait days or weeks for some very simple bugs or problems to be resolved. You loose large amounts of time.
It often happened to me that I had to wait weeks before I receive the basic floorplan of a building while I have the skill to do it myself too, in just half an hour time...The waiting and the discussions are frustrating and pointless. A good level designer should be able to control the entire level himself. A good level designer should be well skilled in artistic aspects as well as gameplay and sound. This was how it used to work in the game industry until a few years ago some companies started to rename all the jobs. I don't even know what to call myself anymore. Am I a level designer ? A Level Artist ? An Environment Artist ? I have no idea anymore because every single company out there defines my job differently.
Level design is way too complex to simply split up.
While the increasing complexity of level design does require more people to work on one level there should always be someone who makes most of the level and keeps control over the level and the overview. The complexity may increase the time and effort, the increasingly better tools and editors available however reduce that time again. Workflow is finally starting to grow up. No more notepads to create shaders but in game menus that show real time previews of anything that happens. It balances out the time issue.
