Posts by PaulH

Quote from [HP]

On ‎11‎/‎7‎/‎2018 at 8:57 PM, [HP] said: Interesting, might try that myself!

I love that the game is slow, I was not expecting this at all. it really helps immersing yourself, and when action does pick up, it becomes really meaningful.

I stopped playing with the radar off by the way, the game just doesn't properly accommodate for it. There's not enough direction given to the player to be able to tell where to go without it, and I got frustrated with going down the wrong paths at crossroads before the NPC with me would say "are you sure this is the right way?" and I'd have to turn around (which takes ages in a carriage). Also they constantly ask you to get behind "the rock" or "go to the vantage point" and there's literally no way to tell which rock or pillar you're supposed to hide behind without the map active. The game is just too rigidly scripted to make this more immersive than frustrating unfortunately.

Quote from [HP]

1 hour ago, [HP] said: You playing with radar off totally or with the compass turned on?

I'm sticking with the compass, and I like that I can access the radar every now and again by just tapping dpad down.

At the moment I'm playing with it all totally off. It's actually quite nice. I feel more rewarded for figuring things out and it's teaching me to pay more attention. I realise it makes things slow but it's a pretty slow game anyway so I thought why not double down ?

I feel like this article summaries my thoughts on this game quite well actually: https://www.patreon.com/posts/thoughts-on-red-22570692. I wouldn't say I find it to be a disappointment at all, but I do feel like I was expecting something a bit more from it. I haven't finished it though, still a long way to go and have been enjoying it more now that I'm spending time outside of the quests (as with the guy in the article) and playing with the radar off as well, which can get a bit tricky but does help with world immersion.

Quote from blackdog

On ‎10‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 6:25 PM, blackdog said: Well done at putting yourself into doing extra stuff! I find difficult to point at many games with prosperous communities, one can be exposed to only so much... definitely CSGO still going strong, there's also still a core of passionate TF2 players and mappers, and there have been community "events" (packs), and of course some HL2. UT seems dead, I haven't seen anyone posting stuff on here for a long time and it doesn't seem to be ever in the news... they used to do community catch-ups livestreams but on the YT channel the last video about patches is 1 year old, maybe @2d-chris knows more, but with Fortnite's success...

I can see many devs like you busy with Q1 or Doom mapping in their spare time. Far Cry 5 has the Arcade system for custom content, and there are tools for Dying Light if you want to get ready for the next (check Will2K campaign topic)

I'm sure you can easily find freelance jobs for UE4 and Unity, there are so many teams around, but I would imagine they'd require more effort than what you probably have time for.

Something much more passive and that you can take at your pace, is producing some courses on the many platforms available. Not sure if you can find a different "angle" to it, as I have the feeling there are so many out there now, also pretty much people ask for UE4/Unity... not sure if with your previous experience with CryEngine, doing one on Lumberyard would give you more return potentially.

Working on a book would surely be cool, I would imagine being very satisfactory if you can abstract enough to talk about LD principles instead of specific tools. You can also get to publish it yourself via Amazon (I have an acquaintance that has gone from robot programmer to writer, after self-publishing his story of ditching the job and going around the world). Books can be very "2.0" as well, I've seen already quite some time ago that you can tie-in digital content with the book like Scott Robertson has done with his concept art books.

Best of luck with your hobby search and I guess let us know what you go for

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Great information, thanks mate. I think I've come up with a couple of ideas, I'll get the ball rolling on them and check back in should they become successful. The LD principles book is something I was thinking about previously actually as I've been digging into a lot of that at work recently and it definitely interests me, it's just a case of figuring out the right angle for it and knowing that there's enough of a market for it (level design is still relatively niche I guess). Might be fun to work on regardless though.

I'm going to take this as a no then ?

Hi all

So I've moved house and moved job and found myself with some free time on my hands and an urge to do something more productive with it. I really miss the days of mapping (outside of work) so that's an option, and ideally I'm looking for a transfer my skills into something that I might profit from, just for some extra cash on the side (for my house and wedding etc).

Has anyone been successful in transferring level design skills to profitable side projects (outside of professional work), and if so what did you end up doing? (Anyone looked into books for example?). I don't want to get into a full on mod project ideally either as I want to be my own boss in terms of time spent on something in case there are periods where i cant work on it. Maybe I'm asking for the moon on a stick eh ?

I think I'm out of touch with mapping in general too, so profit aside what do people even map for now? Is it still just CSGO? And maybe UT?

Cheers!

Hi guys

Playground Games has a couple of Level Design positions available - one is for a Principal Level Designer on our new open world RPG title. The role would be one of owning the macro level vision of the world layout and focusing on high-level open world composition. There's also a Level Designer position available on the Forza Horizon team (details aren't on the website yet as this has just come up).

The company is great with many perks and an awesome bonus scheme, salaries are based on experience. PG was also voted the best place to work (2017) by Gamesindustry.biz! Please check out these positions and more on the website.

https://www.playground-games.com/careers/

And please get in touch if you'd like me to pass on your details for any of these roles

Cheers Paul

Quote from blackdog

On ‎8‎/‎16‎/‎2018 at 12:26 AM, blackdog said: Is that how they call Forza Horizon?

grats! Make sure you give US the inside scoop of what you working on!

It's not Forza

Hey guys, I've changed job and taken the chance to step away from a lead role to get back to a more hands on role, so you can update me to Senior Level Designer at Playground Games, working on their new open world action RPG ?

Including that we are hiring a Lead Level Designer as my replacement, please apply through the website if interested!

http://www.dsdambuster.com/careers

Cheers

This game is decent, am having a good time with it. I've mainly stuck with the Soldier 76 guy as he's basically the Call of Duty type with the medium range assault rifle and the ability to sprint (not sure why sprint has to be a perk in this game though!). I've tried a couple of the others, I think I want to stick to one guy to get used to it and then branch out when I'm feeling a bit more confident. I did try the Widowmaker for a game or two as well and she was pretty good, and also Bastion is ok on some of the defensive games. Who else would you guys recommend? Is there a character out there that tends to be the most popular for any reason?

Quote from [HP]

1 hour ago, [HP] said: By now, the match maker is fairly decent at putting you with people of your skill. This shouldn't be an issue at all for you, even when starting out, there's a gigantic pool of people playing. Plus, not that it matters, but there's actually still loads of new players starting.

Cool, will pick up a copy tomorrow and give it a go, thanks

Quote from TooProForYahoo

3 minutes ago, TooProForYahoo said: absolutely not. The ranked mode can be a little bad at times but the community is still there. Its only been out a year!

Yeah I don't doubt there's a big community for it still

So, shame on me I've never played this, but I've seen that it's going relatively cheap now and was considering picking it up...am wondering if I've left it too late? Am I going to get properly owned by everyone who's had it since last year?

Just finished playing through the original episodes, really good! Could've easily continued playing, is one of those games where it seems a bit of a shame when it's over

For those that don't know, this is free on PS Plus this month along with Killing Floor 2. I'll grab a copy as i've not played it

I watched a bit of this the other night before I left work by the way Beck, good job Have been meaning to pick this game up at some point, always a decent series to play in co-op. Are the x-ray kills available in co-op this time around? Not a deal breaker, just always felt like I was missing out a bit by not playing it SP

I also think this looks and sounds interesting in terms of the setting. I do like the Far Cry games (couldn't finish Primal either though Sprony) - I hope there's a bit of a Leftovers/cult vibe mixed in with all the American redneck-ery

Wonder what happened with IO then? I thought the latest game was great once I got around to playing it.

Just finished playing through this. I wanted to enjoy it as much as you guys seem to have but just couldn't, it was just ok overall I thought. The combat never really crossed the line from annoying to fun for me, you never end up feeling like a typhon smashing badass - maybe that's the point and the odds are always stacked against you to make things scarier, but then being scary wasn't something it was good at either (even with the mimics, which seemed to spawn out of my view cone most of the time rather than presenting any jump scare moments). The space sections were frustrating and disorientating, the little alien pods that race up to you and explode were the worst. There was a point in the midsection of the game where

Spoiler Most of the airlocks are locked and you have to find other means of entering the ship from space, but the entrances were hard to find and I was constantly flying into dark parts of the outer ship and hurting myself or getting swamped by flying aliens

I also spent the last few hours of the game simply sprinting between airlocked sections to progress the story, which was normally a case of running for about a minute and then waiting for a two minute loading screen to disappear (on PS4) then running to the next loading screen and repeating. Really the segmentation of the world in this sense took away from the immersion a bit. I could've hung around in those areas to fight the aliens of course but the game never gave me a reason to do so, maybe if the combat was more fun and there was a levelling mechanic of sorts I might have.

At the end I also reached a point where the game wiped the option for every to complete a bunch of side quests without warning me that progressing with the main quest would force this, which was a bit annoying though I probably wasn't going to attempt them all anyway. On the plus side I thought they had some interesting ideas such as the recycling technology, fabrication and the mimics, and I liked the fact that you could find everyone on board the ship if you wanted to and see what happened to them and the looking glass stuff was cool. I still found it interesting to play through in the end despite the general frustrations above.