Posts by Corwin

I found Hourence's book on How to Break into the Industry far more interesting than the first one, because it felt like the points mentioned were actually "applicable", practical. That's what I'd criticize in the case of almost every game/level design book: they rely too heavily on generalities to fill their pages, but I've yet to see a book that covers any given subject fully. For instance, I'd like books that focus on the composition involved like teaching you all about colors, lighting and shapes and how you can assemble them to give a level a soul, or all about scripting and how to pace a level, etc. rather than have all these themes only briefly mentioned in a single volume. (Although as Steppen said, their authors have the excuse of most of the advanced stuff depending on the engine/game)

In the end, you have to move to other books to dwelve deeper into these concepts, so level design books seem to basically serve as simply a ramp to get to higher things. I'd suggest you get one of them, possibly Game Level Design (because it's well-done, and gives plenty of advices concerning documenting and planning levels) or Hourence's HAWOLD and then widen your horizon by looking into other mediums and inspiration sources. As the others said, architecture books, for instance the work of Francis D.K. Ching or architecture mags are great to give you material for your future creations, and photography books can be great inspiration tools (but there are many free websites such as Flickr where you can find similar stuff, if you can put the garbage aside to find the gems).

That said, I read many game design and level design books a few years back and I don't regret it: even though most of them feel like exploiting the beginners out of their pocket money, they still provide valuable advices that save you time along the line. It's basically: others have been there, made the mistakes, why not listen to them ramble about it so you avoid falling into the same traps? The real question is whether it's worth the money, cause after you've been creating levels for a few years, most of what you'll read you already know.

There are also great articles to be found online stuff more advanced than you might find in books (for instance, there's an article on Gamasutra mentioning all the techniques to guide the players through levels, I'm surprised this wasn't part of any of the books I remember reading).

Quote from ctswin

I highly recommend the level design book by Hourences - he's a member here on the forums http://www.hourences.com/book/index.htm

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the only one I've seen so far is the one Hourences made a while back (the hows and whys of level design).

My favorite book on the subject is Game Level Design, by Ed Byrne. There's about half theory, half tutorials, but the theory part is great and doesn't just fly over important subjects like most of these books usually do. I have to agree though, I have yet to find a book that doesn't try and teach me UnrealEd's basics, but tackles only larger-picture issues.

Quote from Section_Ei8ht

I think I'm weird in the fact that I can't get into the zone if I know I'm going to be interrupted within the next hour, because when I'm in the zone and get train-wrecked out, it's tough to get back in unless I do the smaller-part-snowball method. Seriously, when I get train-wrecked out of the zone, it's physically exhausting for me.

I definitely see what you mean. Usually the laziest hours for me are around the time when my girlfriend is supposed to get off work. She's a nurse so it can vary of around 1 hour, so for these 2 hours when she might just enter the appartment, I can't really get anything done because I'm too afraid of being interrupted when she arrives. It's really annoying to break the flow when you worked so hard to build it.

For me, it's a question of habit, of routine. If I leave for a vacation for 3 weeks like I did this summer, I come back and I really can't be asked to work on my personal projects. But if I set myself a few hours a day to really block the rest and work hard, I catch the rythme and soon time flies by again, and I find myself doing even more than I had set myself because I get caught in the flow.

I also find it helpful to have a notepad next to my desk and put stuff I need to do in order to complete my current project, in no particular order. That way, it's easier even when I'm tired or would rather do something unconstructive, to force myself to work by simply opening my notepad: it puts me back into the needed mindset by allowing me to catch up with my thoughts of the day before, and I can tell myself "Ok, if I can tick off 3 of these points, I can call it a day". Eventually, I usually tick more than I had set myself because I just needed that inpulse.

It's like sports: the first moments are hard, boring, unpleasant and you really have to be willing to exercise and find motivation in yourself, but after that cap is passed, it's a piece of cake and you can go for hours. To me, the more you do, the more you'll be doing and the more you'll enjoy it, because results are what really pays off, and the more results you get the more involved/passionate you become. Though I have to agree with HP: you have to draw a line somewhere, my girlfriend is quick to remind me of that.

Of course, as the others mentioned, inspiration is a great source of motivation aswell. Sometimes just browsing through some of Mapcore's portfolios gives me a urge to go back to work

Quote from Nysuatro

Got it on pc (L4D & L4D2)

I like it. You have to bear in mind though that dark portfolios are usually that way because screenshots are pleasant to look at when the background is dark and uniform, so I suggest you insert some screens in these squares and see how it looks with completely different color themes and shapes in the shots before you flesh your concept further.

About your domain name, I think the simpler the better, but there's no real need to find something extraordinarily memorable. People trying to remember your portfolio's address will be few anyway. Even with a standard name, a search like "surname lastname portfolio" should still put you on the first page of google. You'll have to mention your name in text a few times for google to take it into account though since it doesn't read images, like in the page title (what's displayed at the top-left of the browser), or as titles/alt for images.

The issue about design decisions and all that has been raised in the "How to break into the industry thread" I think (or maybe the other one I made about my egotistical self), and the advices given were that the best way to show your reasoning is to write post-mortems afterwards, in which you explain away every important decision you made, show the progress the level went through etc.

I agree with Chris on the Desired Position bit, as that'd be something you'd put on a resume or application letter instead. If you still want to stick with something like that, my suggestion would be to say instead "Available for hire" or "Looking for work" or "Hire me!".

Finally, about the 2 styles you mention, I'd prefer the second one (peris), because however you might think one of your assets is better than others, different individuals and companies will have different interests and likings and might not consider that huge picture appealing and leave it at that because the stuff that they would have liked was too small to strike them. Just ordering stuff by date usually means that the best is on top (since your craft should be improving) and still make other projects more visible instantly. You have to convince the viewer to dwelve deeper into the portfolio in the first few seconds so either make sure the big shots are really indoubtebly awesome or give equal sizes to all of them.

PS: if you need help with coding the website I wouldn't mind giving you a hand

Looks good! I also think that if you add snow on the buildings nooks and crannies you should consider adding some on the low walls and the wooden barbwire supports aswell, to be consistent If you don't add any on the truck, I'd suggest increasing the size of the dirt around it and maybe darkening it a bit so it looks like it burned not too long ago, maybe even add some remaining fumes.

EDIT: Damn, quickier

Quote from ultradr3mer

the idea behind my level is, that because the contest theme was mine, and i like sci fi, i would make a futuristic subway, leading through an old mine.

I wrote my ideas on the subject on the pictures. I hope you can make sense out of the mess

[Blocked Image: http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/7422/mine20040.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/4068/mine20042.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5767/mine20041.jpg]

Additionally to what I mentioned, I think your mine theme would have been more interesting if instead of the petrol lanterns you'd have used shining rocks or plants. I mean, a mine is supposedly to scavenge something, so rocks reflecting light or glowing would have provided a good way to lit the mine, would have made more sense (why would somebody go and place lanterns around in an abandoned mine?) and would have looked more immersed in the surroundings IMHO.

I'm deep into scripting the Crysis level I've been working on for about 7 months now:

[Blocked Image: http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/5994/crysiscorwindev01.jpg]

Progress is going smooth. I really enjoy the ability to draw shapes simply and let the engine figure the rest like altitude and waypoints, but also to be able to place waypoints by hand when necessary (close-quarters areas). I should reach a playable prototype around mid-december.

Agreed! Borderlands has a low FOV aswell by default, and it forced most of my friends to go into their mouse settings everytime they wanted to play the game to lower the sensibility, as because of the FOV even the lowest setting in the game menus resulted in their characters doing 360 turns whenever they slightly moved their mouse. Eventually, there's a trick to put it back to 90 but it shouldn't have to be a trick. The new FOV in l4d2, with weapons taking a quarter of the screen, was also repulsive at first compared to the perfect FOV of left4dead.

In my opinion, most of the time it's due to all the cheap ports from consoles: dodgy key settings (where setting new keys don't change all the instances ingame), shit optimization and the damn unplayable FOV are very common nowadays. Sometimes it feels like nobody even plays the game at least once after converting it to PC...

Quote from seir

Every engine have their own scripting tools. In most cases it's Lua code or own script language + GUI... You can't just learn one type of scripting method and use it anywhere...

Indeed, it's more important to have touched a few of these scripting languages and develop the mindset necessary to do it, so you can learn just any other one. It's simple programming logic after all, shouldn't be too hard to grasp, but you need to have some experience beforehand. Doing scripted levels also teaches a lot about planning the player's actions and reacting in consequence: your scripting needs to take every single case of player interaction into account, and you'll acquire the mindset to do that by practicing.

Quote from Nysuatro

Just bought L4D2 and zombies vs plant en some game for 2 euro on steamI love steam sales

Same here, got Dead Space, Plants vs. Zombies, Mini Ninjas, Madballs and KOTOR!

Quote from DysPatch

[Blocked Image: http://danielmiede.com/scrapyard/ps_snowstorm_rc110011.jpg]Map I am working on for FA:S

Looks good! Maybe it's the angle from where the shot is taken, but it looks like both barbwire fences are parallel, looking sort of copy-pasted.

Quote from sarge mat

Steam is still "scanning for game updates" which I think a few people are having issues with. Looking forward to playing and seeing what the story with the SDK is.

Same here

Quote from Warby

i am a lower case nazi as is evident by anything i have ever written but i should most definitely proof read these fuckers more at least for punctuation !but i am not a suit in real life so i will not pretend to be one on my portfolio site.

Yeah, I sort of agree with not pretending to be what you aren't. Simple punctuation and dividing the biggest comments into paragraphs will do wonders and should be plenty enough.

Quote from Warby

i dont know what the latest state of the art crawlers can do but seeing how registration on forums always uses these warped and noised up pictures to keep bots out i figured they have learend to read images by now but maybe not ... anybody know anything here ?!

Well, they can try and read the images that you mentioned, but as far as I know they can't browse websites in look of email addresses in images, since they aren't generated randomly, there can be so many different styles, colors, fonts, sizes, etc. And anyway, if they're smart enough to grab an address from an image, I guess simply replacing @ by a-t won't fool them.

Quote from Warby

thats not gonna happen i was very contiouse about putting everything on "one" page this time around .... it didn't really work out layout wise to have the resume and gallery on the same page so i separated them out onto 2 pages but that already took huge amounts of efforts to convince me to do so going back to the "old" way of level design section 3d art section etc is a no go i want back catalog or my projects sorted by time.

Of course man, it's up to you

Good luck with polishing it up!

Woa, there's quite a lot of content in there! Good stuff!

My opinion on the usability:

- I think the "zoom in" effect on the pictures works perfectly, as it doesn't obsctruct the rest of the screen or prevent you from scrolling down on bigger shots like Lightbox used to behave.

- I'm sure it's temporary, but the "read commentary" contents are all massive blobs of text without uppercase etc. You should still have paragraphs, correct punctuation etc. in these comments or people will click, see how messy they look, and skip to the next images. I also think these commentaries are too "laid back", too blog/forum-like and don't really suit a portfolio. You should keep them simple, to the point, and professional-like.

- I think your "download" links could use an icon next to them, because I missed them at first.

- You should have a distinct color or text-decoration for the links anyway, because right now they look exactly like the project titles which aren't links. Simply underlining them would do the trick, or a warmer color would attract attention.

- It's usually good to be able to know instantly where in a website you're "standing". That means giving clues to the visitors about what page they're viewing. For instance, I clicked Gallery because I thought it would be a selection of your best shots, but instead realized it was the homepage I was on. You should consider adding a visual clue about which page is "activated", like a small arrow or point next to gallery when you're on the gallery page, and on Resume when that's what you're visiting.

- Nitpicking here, but I think the space between each projects "block" could be increased a bit, by 10 to 20px for example. Right now, everything is a bit too clustered for my tastes. It would also make it instantly clear which link (download/comment) belongs to which project.

- Since you used "anti-spam" techniques in your mail, you've already given up on the easy of use of just clicking or copying the email address. So I think you should then consider making it an image instead. Make it more visual, as right now there is no @ so it doesn't look like an email address when you scan the page. Turn it into a pic and that way you get rid of the spam issue and still have an email address that clearly looks like one.

- That's entirely my personal opinion on the matter, but I would have classed your project by type, instead of by date. That would have made for an easier navigation pattern: instead of having to go to a page, scroll it down, then click "older" again, scroll it down, etc., I would have grouped them under 3 or 4 sections like "Levels", "Drawings", "Models", "Misc", or "3D", "2D", "Others". That way, people can select to only see what they're interested in and don't have to watch everything in order to access the oldest stuff. I also think it's a bit cheap how the projects titles are displayed (maybe it's because of the way the guy coded it for you) and the underscores in the titles don't look good. Classing your drawings under a main page would render "new_digital_painting_batch" titles useless, and you'd be able to simply put all of them together in order of date and let people click on the ones that appeal to them. On the Levels or 3D page, you should still keep the names of the maps you created though, but I think they could use some enhancement like uppercases, no underscores, maybe bold type, etc. Also, with my previous comment in mind, you should make clear which page the viewer is currently on if you adopt this idea, for instance giving a different color or an icon next to the Levels link if that's what the visitor is reading.

I personally will be buying the game as soon as I can save enough money for it, and that simply for the singleplayer campaign. I own MW but never actually played the multiplayer until a couple of weeks ago since all you guys were saying how great it is. It's pretty good, a bit confusing because of how much shit is going on at once, but nothing as good as the singleplayer IMO.

Rarely have I encountered such high production values in a SP game. That's not to say it features the best story ever or even the most fun gameplay, but there's not a single part of it that I found frustrating, it's beautiful, there's lots of multiple different types of gameplay, and the attention to detail is incredible. It's also one of the only SP games that made me really feel like being part of a team, not a single wastelander against the whole world.

More updates of my Crysis project:

[Blocked Image: http://www.clement-melendez.com/portfolio/pictures/mandate/mandate24big.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.clement-melendez.com/portfolio/pictures/mandate/mandate25big.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.clement-melendez.com/portfolio/pictures/mandate/mandate26big.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.clement-melendez.com/portfolio/pictures/mandate/mandate27big.jpg]

Been playing with the weather and lighting but that's not final.

I'm currently making a second pass through the whole thing, to add AI nodes, fill the zones that were too empty with cover and obstacles, and script it all. I'll then go through it one more time to tweak the vegetation itself and add the final touches like cut-scenes, custom signs, polished models etc.