Two rants on level design, need opinions

Hourences it sounds like you're deeply frustrated by the people you work with... maybe time to circulate the ol' resume

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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 workflow at Crytek is similar to what you describe above and what seems to be present at Gearbox as well.

The level-designer is the author of the mission, yet nobody "owns" a level, it is a contribution of all departments and often other designers. One designer might design the mission on paper, creates the layout and adds basic game logic and AI, then maybe another one takes over, reviews it and possibly revamps a few parts, then finishes it off (or goes back to the drawingboard if you realize that it simply won't work or will be satisfactory, can happen too...)

All the assets, special AI or game code, sounds need to be requested by the designer and will be produced by the other departmens. Of course under the consideration of the timeframe.

The designer might be able to block out the level with tools embedded in the editor, to test gameplay, but all that is concerning the look of the level, is up to the concept artists who sit with the designers to create the best possible look. 3D artists create the assets while communicating with the designer to take all gameplay relevant aspects into account.

Sounds and animations of course also have to be requested and added, the responsible animators and sound designers of course often also give their own input (just like the artists) about what they like to see/hear in the level.

The level-designer always needs to find a compromise between the needs and requests of the other departments, because some of them sometimes conflict. So the level-designer needs to have a basic knowledge about how to create nice terrain, what AI needs to work, how the lighting should vaguely be like, what the player would consider frustrating or boring etc.

I think that sums up the responsibilites and tasks of a level-designer here, the content creation of the levels is split up between the departments, but the designers keep in control of the missions and add everything. Some of us are better at AI, another one always got the know-how about the latest magic from our R&D department, others have a better artistic eye, so we try to share our knowledge to give each designer a solid understanding of each area. We also got a few technical designers, who specialize in scripting, but we don't have somebody doing AI for each mission, doing lighting for each mission etc.

But you need to decide, either you are a good author of a mission and create the basis for other people to work on a specific thing in your level to make it shine, or you specialize yourself and join a different department. It is getting to complex to be top notch at everything.

About the hobby, amateur side of things:

Duffy from ID software recently said "The MODding community is past its peek" and I think that is sad but true, at least it will take more people, work and better coordination to develop a MOD which is on par with the game's standards it is developed for.

This got longer than it was meant to be, sorry. Good topic by the way.

Yeah, it's sad really, the amount of effort required to do something decent in Source compared with HL is staggering and is what really puts me off trying it to be honest, I just don't have the skillset to do everything required.

The amount of personnel and skillsets required now to make a mod for current gen stuff is so much greater than it used to be and that makes it a lot harder to get anything done. Part of the fun of the Quake era was that you didn't need a 20 man team to make a mod and the short lifecycle involved meant there was a lot more variety in what you saw. Even with HL stuff you needed a fair amount of guys to do anything decent, especially later on in the games lifespan.

You know what? My opinion is..

you know this is the vital thing about level design.

Why write 100 pages? Why waste so much time on this.. Why do the hands pain?

Level-Design is like a big rubiks cube..

First time you do a room it's made of 5 walls because the top is the skybox, and when you finish your level you add 5 boxes to the skybox. It will get more complicated the more you do.

Then you get it. If not...

Then you never learned the cube. If you learn that, you will learn level design. Did u get it?

Do you guys think, in the future, since level design is getting too complex for the community, that those of us who already have industry jobs will become a rare, last-of-their-kind group? I guess what I mean is, do you think that in the future, most people that get hired for traditionally level designer specific tasks like lighting will be artists? Are we the last of the true level designers?

At the same time, I see the emergence of a kind of mapping where people are just placing prefabs. Look at Track Mania. Maybe that's the future of mapping. Look at the newest engines and the mod communities surrounding them. All the custom HL2 maps look just like the official maps. It happens in the UT community as well. People are just placing the same static meshes, using the same textures, and sticking to the same old visual theme. It's getting too hard for most would-be mappers to do good custom work.

So do you think Level Designer will turn into Gameplay Designer? I think it has already started.

You know I want to see in the future? That the whole mapcore collective

will be one big firm producing games.

And if it will someday happen, It will win over all other firms.

that souds like a plan

that would certainly rock my boat

but about the "specialization" thing.

i think there will always be those who are able to do it all themselves AND most important in that i think is that with doing it all yourself you can realise what YOU envision and not what a combination of a lot of people think (guy A screaming building1 should have blue lighting and person B who created the building saying NO it should be yellow).

in some or many cases *dunno about that* it would be good to add to eachother but that would depend on how well the team works together. by making things together things tend to get less original and more and more mainstream.

wich also adds to the fact that big company's many times work with the specialization thing and smaller company's most times let their people choose what they think it should be.

much more freedom. also when i look at games nowadays, almost all games i REALLY like are made by the teams that started at a big company but stepped away and started their own company just because of the fact they want their "freedom" back.

these company's employees many times have already "proven" themselves and therefore CAN find their fundings for original and just simply weird ass games. the way i see the game industry, where going towards a big monopolised shithole, but one way or another, there will come a time where the "big" company's realise theyre doing it the wrong way (cause they simply *many times* create shitty or mainstream games, gaming gets more and more mainstream wich means more and more gamers will know what the good games are wich will result in them not buying the "mainstream sucker" games. therefore it wil posibly be so that they step away from their fast fast fast! method and start realising that the smaller company's who create the coolest games with less funding then their bigger brothers will become more aparent...

i know hard read, but i think you guys get what im saying

smaller teams, original idea's are the future.

also a thing that makes this possible is the fact that the way content is created gets more easy, yes ofcourse it takes more time to create like say a unreal engine 3 game compared to a unreal engine 2 game BUT like epic works, they try to create the best tools they can to make work more easy. if you then look at valve... well no need to say much but they should be ashamed of themeselves. if they had created better tools right from the start we would probably already be waiting for hl2 add-on nr.4 or so...

anyway this is the way i look at things and for most part hope things will work out in the future. but ofcourse this is something like a best case scenario, there will always be those who want to cash in instead of create games they like themselves. those with the passion and the will to sacrifice a higher loan in the beginning will be the winners eventually.

start small and end big will always be around the corner, its our nature. these days i fortunately see more and more people rejecting the capitalist ways of thinking...

Quote from TomWithTheWeather

Do you guys think, in the future, since level design is getting too complex for the community, that those of us who already have industry jobs will become a rare, last-of-their kind group? I what I mean is, do you think that in the future, most people that get hired for traditionally level designer tasks like lighting will be artists? Are we the last of the true level designers?

This scares me somewhat.

I think there's certainly an element of truth in it.

I made/make levels for fun. It's not a career path for me because I alreadyu have a job and more debt that a small African nation, so I'm always going to be a hobbyist, but when things get as complex as they are now and making what I want entails churning out model after model and then begging someone to texture/compile etc it just puts me off the whole process. I'm sick to death of the limitations placed on me by the HL engine, but I can't work with next gen stuff because my limited skills in other areas prevent me from even hashing together basic stuff.

Nexus, not sure what you're saying, but my point is that you can't just go placing in brushes and making nice lights and interesting architecture and muddling along with free textures and then ending up with something thats actually half decent Now you have to be able to model and texture your own stuff to a point where it works seamlessly with the environment you're placing it in. The current gen of stuff (D3, Source, UT whatever) means anything aside from the norm is out of the reach of all but the most talented and artistic of folk.

Ominous talk like “are the last true level designers?” makes me grimace. Are we talking creative leverage here? Here's a crappy example that worked until I typed it out: In Davej’s Etc campaign he had a lot more control over things than he did in Dust, and certainly a lot more control that he would have in a commercial product. He not only created the architecture for the maps themselves, but also the back-story, story sequences, events, everything. Of course the story was just there for an excuse to shoot things and the map was originally for him to play with env_shake, but the principal is he created a lot more aspects of the map.

Basically my point is this; if we were all to go away and create a bullet pointed list of what we considered to be level design the lists would be very similar in certain places but very varying in others.

Though that’s really all by-the-by, I agree with the OP in the first article that as things become more complex areas of the design process will be spread out over more people - it’s inevitable really. For instance, what’s a game designer today? Someone on a team that creates a design document highly subject to chance and oversees other people so they fulfil to their vision. Twenty years ago? A couple of guys in a basement on an Amstrad 464 doing everything.

I don’t, however, agree the solution is for people to broaden their horizons to try and delay the effects of this. That seems kind of counterproductive; instead focusing on a specific aspect you enjoy (the architecture, the modelling, the textures, the scripting, etc) would seem like the better solution than being a jack-of-all-trades.

I found it hard to digest the second article because it seems more assuming the different designers were not on the same wavelength, or at least that was the ideal I kept forcing into the text. I won’t comment on it, because I’m sure we’ll go off on a tangent.

meh, there will always be level designer positions, its a very important role. Only thing is there is more help doing it, contributors, etc. I ve researched many companies and thier projects and it seems more level designers are getting junior position contributors more then anything. This is to get more people including all roles into the industry to help build better games becuase of the resources they are beginning to take. Next Gen is the same old thing, just better looking games, relax peoples

Quote from Dark

meh, there will always be level designer positions, its a very important role. Only thing is there is more help doing it, contributors, etc. I ve researched many companies and thier projects and it seems more level designers are getting junior position contributors more then anything. This is to get more people including all roles into the industry to help build better games becuase of the resources they are beginning to take. Next Gen is the same old thing, just better looking games, relax peoples

Err what?

What do you mean by contributors?

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I ve researched many companies and thier projects and it seems more level designers are getting junior position contributors more then anything. This is to get more people including all roles into the industry to help build better games becuase of the resources they are beginning to take

WHAT? ENGLISH?

Its pretty clear so i donno, just sticking up for Level Designers, I was pretty much talking about what you mentioned at the top of page 2 Klein execpt drunk at the time.

I wanted to add to the end of Hourences Rant 2

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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.

You are an Artist - Plan n Simple.

Actually I was told by an executive from HB Studios that a lot of companies are beginning to name there staff all Artists, Senior/Junior, to end the constant confusion

I totally agree with you Hourences and this is also something I wanted to point out with my post on the previous page. But, I think I didnt quite succeeded in that and you did (guess that has to do with English not being my first language) Your attitude is the right one to go with, thats for sure

I want to add my 2 cents on a somewhat different perspective of things. I'm a person who knows (not to be egotistical here) a lot about many things, yet I'm no expert on them all. Though I do have the insight in certain area's of game design that, for example, CAN make me a good mod leader and thats why I think its important not to overspecialize yourself. Keep the variety in things and your horizon becomes a lot wider. It allows you more posibilities.

Most importantly, you have to learn that some people DO specialize themselves and that they are simply better at things than you are yourself. This also adds the fact that it, for me atleast, makes me a person who knows (very well) how to work together with others. I think in gamedesign, you should allow your teammates the freedom of how they see things and how they work. Ofcourse you work together but if for example a level designer on my team says he wants to do it his way instead of my way, and it fits to the idea we aim for, then he gets that freedom. Its about being realistic in these things and working together well and understanding each other, because some cases simply won't let you do it yourself. Someone else might make your idea even better then it already was and, if you can accept and learn from that and are open for good criticism, then the possibilities are simply endless in what you can achieve.

REALLY understanding each other in what you say is what many times can make or break a mod or even a game. Its just so important to not be afraid to ask if you dont understand. Many people I've worked with in the past weren't like this when I first met them. Most of the time, I succeeded in "changing" their way of working and thinking (in ofcourse an as much positive way possible), so that we could really work well together.

I could rant about this all day adding more things but I dont want that and neither do most here, but I do hope I can "affect" some around here in whatever way. It might be so that some things I have written down here aren't clear to people cause I may have formulated things in a wrong way. If you dont get what I'm saying, then ask me and I'll try to explain. If you disagree with me, tell me why, maybe your right i dunno, we're all humans after all.

(anyway, sorry for the hard read. I hope you find it worthy of reading)

E: Mojo: Just made it easier to read so its all now

I do agree man, but things change , thats life and you have a great talent, your already a professional, so suck it up and stop ranting. I'd give anything to be in your position right now. I'm sure tons of others would as well. Your damn good at your work so just keep doing the best you do and make some hardcore cash along the way, heh.

Quote from Hourences

Well no because I am also a designer...gameplay wise...so calling myself just an artist still wouldnt do.Everyone keeps saying that things get too complex and that it is normal they get split up but I simply wonder why would they need to be ?

Time contrains for one thing. Like Zaphod said earlier, depending on the scope of your game you simply cannot design, model, texture and light a whole next-gen quality game (level) all by yourself under industry standard deadlines. Also, just because you are an all-around-guy doesn't mean everybody else is. I know a ton of level designers who are just that. Designers. I think anything related to art should be left to the artists to create, not the designers. Of course the two should always be in constant communication with eachother so both visions are merged into one.

Quote from Hourences

If the future is like trackmania I quit this whole thing and go to movie cg graphics.

Umm you DO know that movie CG is even more specialized and split up than games right?

Future of level design community:

Well I am still impressed in what some people can make when just using the orriginal assets of a game. (well for HL2 anyway)

I agree that making a attractive level became more difficult, but as long as you can work with existing resources and can make something decent, a mod might be interested in the designer and with that mod the designer might have acces to custom content done by other members of the mod.

Now some knowledge on the different aspects on the design is nessesary but I doubt you need to be elite in all fields.

Now the future might be in 'game design shools' the people graduating will probebly contribute to varioes (mod) community's to practice their skills or making stuff with friends from shool.

So I don't see quality of levels degrade in the future or skilled people turning their back to the community.

The reason Valve didn't allow custom content is because they had no way to check who's property the custom content is, it might have been stolen from somewhere else.

Splitting design up

I can only speak from my mod expirience so this might as well be irrelevant, but my map for insurgency would look not half of what it is now if I had to do it all by myself

I design the map and do the model and skin requests for stuff thats to complicated to do myself and request that stuff from someone else on the team along with reference or anything relevant and request changes to what they made untill its the way I want it to be.

But that might not work fast enough for a gamestudio

I believe Valve works with units: a team of (multiple?) leveldesigner, texture artist and modeler and design a map together.

When taking a brief look some splits I wonder if its like like one guy does his thing and send it on to the next in line like its a machine line constructing a car or something,

I can see that would not have great results for leveldesign unless you need to make 20x the same level

So for me ,from a theorethical point of view, splitting a level up over multiple people should not be a problem as long as they work (and communicate) as a team.