Yeah that was what originally threw me, scripting vs editor tools that do "traditional" scripting for you. I'm pretty familiar with Source and Kismet so I just threw together a small scripted gameplay segment and hoped for the best as I emailed that off to the HR guy that asked for "scripting examples" from me.
Guess I over-worried, since I got offered the job 
As a level designer, how much time do you spend with scripting?
What language do you use (or if its proprietary, what is it most similar to?)
Obviously this will vary between something like a single player designer and a multiplayer FPS designer, but just checking for a general consensus.
I've got a resume in somewhere and they seem to be placing a lot of weight on scripting knowledge =(
*edit* well damn, Corwin did me better with screenshots... And we both called some of the same stuff. Cheers.
Stuff that popped at out at me;
(Apologies if this seems overly negative. I blame my job)
By screenshot number;
16 - Angled brace made of concrete is odd. I don't think bridges actually do this. Also, the texture is still at 90 degrees and not matching the geometry angle. Those yellow traffic trash cans seem out of place under a bridge, especially with a random lantern there. Why is there a lantern there? You can make some visual narrative that could explain these things, like another survivor group using the trash cans to make a sort of barricade/shelter or something.
17 - Really long unbroken skyline. Antenna's, water towers, electric poles, buildings in the distance, needs *something* to break up a straight line. Huge building with plain brick wall is... dangerous.
19 - Skyline again. This place looks really empty (the ground). The light doesn't seem to cast an actual light on the ground even though it appears to be a pretty powerful light.
20 - Cool, running on busted up boats. Initially thought you could turn it into a dynamic prop and sorta sway, but that'd probably mess with nav mesh. Anyway... Those lights in the background look weird. The light bulb is visible, but the lighting on the wall starts like 20-30 units below it. Another really long unbroken skyline
2 - 2? Weird order of screenshots... Is that boat hanging halfway off a dock or something? It seems odd (ie, physically impossible, unless its resting on something). The wooden trim around the dock is slightly raised, but not under the handrails? Not sure if that was on purpose, it just jumped out at me.
3 - This one prompted my whole post. Ok... Unbroken skyline. Two materials for a building without something breaking the transition. The windows on the second floor of the building on the left look like they're doors. The building also wouldn't have 3 separate doors, within 10 feet of each other. The building on the right, are those awnings or balcony's? They look like balcony's, but they don't have rails. None of the buildings have anything else (gutter drains, power boxes, wires, etc)
7 - What are those black girder things on both sides of this bridge? This entire thing really confuses me. Is this a make-shift bridge or a 'real' bridge under construction or something? Would need a better look at it...
10 - DOOR TRIMS! Magical floating doors connected to a brick wall do NOT exist in the real world. The transition between floor textures is also a bit jarring for me.
11 - Window trims on the ceiling. Also, the texture tiling. You have it split in half on both edges. Something looks weird above the right doorway where the wall meets the ceiling. Not sure if its a different texture or lighting weirdness.
12 - Huge area with nothing in it. Cement bricks look GINORMOUS on the shop on the right. Malls don't usually have visible brick or concrete on the inside...
14 & 15 - Your lights here look weird. Place the light higher to the ceiling, turn off "cast shadow" on the light prop. Place looks too big as a restaurant too.
Ok your next set of screenshots are all named the same thing... Why do you hate me? Comments from top to bottom
1 - Is that a wire connecting crossing a river from lights to a generator...?
2 - The concrete barricade in the street looks really out of place, since it has nothing else there explaining why it's there. The apparently 50 foot long single piece of wood creating a bridge feels MORE out of place.
4 - Dock, connecting to some sort of rock thing, in the middle of a river? How do the boats get past this?
EVERYTHING - There doesn't seem to be any power lines in your part of the city.
The lighting link posted is good, check that out.. It's probably a good idea to read up on general color theory as well. All your lights appear to be purely white (except the fire and red lights on the forklift)
Not to harp on it too much, but door trims. Seriously, look at ANY door in the real world. They won't look like yours. I know you might figure it's just a stupid minor detail, but there's this thing called cognitive dissonance where you notice the tiny things that look WRONG even if they're really minor. So even if your map is doing a lot of things really great, a lot of people will instinctively be drawn to the things that look weird. For me, that's door trims...
Other stuff;
In screenshot 004, you have 2 different buildings sharing a face. White bricks and red bricks. It looks... odd, to me. It might just be the perspective, but I'd put something to break that line up, like a fenced alley or something. (Why's a camping lantern sitting on top of a car...)
screenshot 007, large swathes of walls/ceiling with nothing interesting on them.
screenshot 010, a window wouldn't have its bottom edge that close to the floor. In my college drafting class windows were always at least 36 inches off the floor, but, admittedly, I don't know if that's an architectural standard or was just the teachers.
screenshot 016, there doesn't seem to be much debris for the area, considering it looks like a bus went through a brick wall. (I know I know, it's a WIP... just saying)
screenshots 019 to 022, this whole area (with the white tiled floor) looks REALLY open. What is it supposed to be? I could see it working as like a building lobby, but there's no desks, counters, chairs, plants, etc to suggest any use for this area.
screenshot 025, it looks like the air vent or whatever that is on the ceiling can be moved to line up with the edges of the boards (?) on the ceiling.
screenshot 029, is that the broken plaster wall used on a brick wall? Not sure if there's a prefab broken brick wall, might have to do it the hard way
Couple things that jumped out at me;
Doorways should have trims.
Your walls look REALLY thick. 16 units maybe? I always thought 8 was standard
Some of your rooms look GINORMOUS. The starting room is hella huge, and has 2 tables and a TV in it. What room is this supposed to be (in the real world)?
High Voltage sign near an elevator confuses me. Is it an elevator? Now I'm not so sure...
It also looks really dark. It's hard (or impossible?) for me to get any sense of the flow of the level, but make sure something is leading the player along... Lighting, objects, blood smears etc. Get it playtested and insist on some people running through with their flashlights off. It helps a lot in finding weak areas that aren't leading the player. (Did for me, anyway)
Soooooooooo yeah. Trying to respond to everything in one post here
Survivors spawn literally in front of the health cabinet and guns, so I guess I banked on them remembering where it is, but I threw down a dead body with a blood trail by the health cabinet with one health pack near the dead body (aw, they didn't make it in time...) I didn't want to add more lights, especially in such a central location, so hopefully the contrast on the floor is enough to draw your eye to the cabinet during the normal chaos of the game.
The suspended walkway was intended for like patrolling guards or something. The rooms on the right were planned to be like high security cells that the walkway looks down into, but I had problems with scaling early on and just threw some beds in there. :-|
The barbed wire fences is supposed to be securing the elevator, I suppose some sort of broken gate on the ground might sell that idea better...
So, I'll give you the one of the lighting being all one tone, but I'm not so sure on needing to lead players around. It's a survival map. So it's just a small contained area that has no real beginning or end, so I wouldn't know where I'm trying to lead players to. From my own experience, players crisscross the map a lot. If you have any examples of what you'd like to see done, that'd help me understand.
Lighting, yeah it's pretty blue. I was going for a dead cold feel with the moonlight n stuff, think I'll tone it down slightly. Half of the lights are already near some main paths that infected go by. I'm experimenting with having one of the light stands tipped over with the lights pointed up to get better dynamic shadows on a pretty empty wall. I didn't want the place really well lit, as the story (in my own head) is this place was already barricaded up by survivors and overrun previously. You, as another survivor, are coming into the area after the battle has already been lost, if that makes sense.
I could totally be overthinking that though...... It might be more visible with a video or ingame.
I am trying to figure out what to do with the upper walls and ceiling. It's all just a flat uninteresting space and I'm thinking some kind of support rafters can go up there.
Was hoping to be done with this by the beginning of June... there's just always something that needs to be fixed or redone.
ANNNNNNNNNNND, one last thing, does anyone know if they used volumetric lighting at all in L4D? the vol_light textures don't seem to work for me, and I couldn't find any place in the game that uses it. It seems they relied on point_spotlights for all their beam effects, but I wanted some moonlight streaming in from the glass ceilings and they're huge squares so a point spotlight wouldn't work... 
Added a couple lights in two of the darkest areas, messed with the color correction to lighten up the deepest shadows and give the whole thing a sterile cold feeling (color correction only works in tools mode sadly), and put in some fog to lighten the far distant areas.
There's still a couple of areas that have really deep shadows, but they're mostly small areas on the edges.
Better? Worse? Be honest, I can take it. I'm not a :ssj: guy
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I don't really post here very much, but I've been lurking for a couple years... Just another survival map here, any and all feedback is appreciated (is it too dark?)
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Downloads? http://%7boption%7d
Quote from SkjalgWhy does both suns need to be visible at the same time?I mean, why cant there be one night-time sun and one day-time sun, and around noon only one is visible?
Pretty sure the only way that's possible is for the planet to be between the two stars of a binary star system (which would mean the planet would be ripped to shreds from the dual gravity fields)
Has nothing to do with star wars, thats just how binary star systems work....
Quote from st0lveI'm just kinda pissed that the NAV mess is required to have a working survival map
Also, survival map example would have been nice.
the nav mesh is required to have ANY working map. It's not even really that bad, the auto analyze and generate will get most of it done for you, and you have to manually build connections for ladders.. The worst part of working with nav meshes is the cumbersome gui and lack of being able to move. There's tutorials on putting nav mesh commands in a radial wheel that (seem to) make it 1000 times easier to work with, but anyway, the auto tools will do 99% of it for you by itself.
Quote from zeOxjust leave it hanging and it'll eventually "unfreeze".
I get an error when compiling maps which reads "Steam validation rejected". anyone have any idea on how to fix this?
'+sv_lan 1' in console
True to the style, you kept it very brown and monochromatic =/
An overview would help in seeing the gameplay possibilities, as a couple screenshots doesn't really let people see that.
The lighting is really flat and doesn't seem to pull the player anywhere, large areas of unbroken textures looks... boring. Use decals or other props to break up large areas like walls and floors.
Half of the wall in the third screenshot looks purple. Not sure if that's weird lighting or a compile issue.
I'd be interested in knowing what people actually consider crunch. For me, a couple nights of overtime isn't crunch. Even a week or two for some random milestone wouldn't be too bad for me. Four months of 6-day weeks on the other hand, definitely is crunch.
At what point does it go from "Need to stay late for X nights" to "Goddamn when can we submit this so I can make sure my house is where I left it"?
Well I just finished it. I would have liked more puzzles... that didn't involve cranks.
Most of the bad reviews I read or people I talked to that didn't like it all started off the same "So I beat the game in two days..."
When you have a 12 hour game, and you're cramming that all in 2 days, you're going to hella notice the repetitive aspects of it. It was the same way for Assassins Creed. People either loved it or hated it. There didn't seem to be much of a middle ground.
Not that playing a game slower will negate any of your opinions, but personally I was able to enjoy this game a lot more because I wasn't playing to get to the end.
Regarding level design (seeing as thats what this community is about) I really liked The Vale and City of Light. Loved the whole quasi steam punk technology mixed with the natural trees and waterfalls in Vale. This was my favorite area. Parts of City of Light are great too, especially when you get those wide vistas of a huge cityscape and then realize just how massive this cave has to be.
Least favorite was the Ruined Citadel. Long plate sequences that had flying in it ruined it for me. I hate the flying... Speaking of which, the princes cape hangs straight down during flying sequences... no flapping in the wind.. No sense of speed.. Kinda 
In general, the visual language was good, I never was lost or didn't know how to get through an area. Most of the structures seemed (oddly) believably functional.
Long time lurker, first time poster. Had to register to offer a counter to Warby's opinions (love your maps, dont hate me k?)
I'm only about 40-50% through, so.. level of validity may vary?
I love the free roaming. I've never hit a loading screen, except when teleporting, which is awesome. Even in other 'open world' games I will hit a loading screen in the middle of gameplay that ruins any semblence of immersion.
Combat is, well... yeah. It seems like they downplayed the combat for this game, and made it more traversal/exploration based, so I can kinda be ok with the relative weakness of it. In spite of that, the combos are really cinematic and there seems to be tons of variation. Of course, once you find a winning combo there's not much incentive to try new stuff out rather than to use the new 'iwin' combo each time.
Grinding is a bit unfair. In the achievements (360 version...) there's one for collecting 1001 light seeds. You only need less than 500 to open up all the areas in the game. When I'm going through areas I've healed, I end up getting about 60-70% of the seeds in the area without even really trying to get the out of the way ones. Needing to revisit an area when you get a new power just to collect the last 3 or 4 seeds is kind of annoying, especially when trying to remember just exactly where that last setup was at.
360 version has a couple of achievements for exploration. Highest/lowest points of the game both give achievements. I haven't found either.
I kinda like the dialogue actually. It's giving me some sense of connection with the characters, rather than them being silent the entire time. The story is cliche, but whatever... how many times have we all saved the world and/or princess from inevitable destruction in the last 20 years of gaming?
Agree with the jump pads, but only because it's too over the top for me.
Flying....... I *just* unlocked flying. After doing the little intro area when unlocking it, I went 
Wave goodbye to immersion...
The corrupted areas ARE dark and murky and look ugly. They're CORRUPTED. They're SUPPOSED to look 10 times less good than when they are healed. (Or, I'm assuming they should be...) It all makes sense to me.....
Elika teleporting me back has always been to the previous flat platform. I've never had any issues with this except in one area that had a TON of wall run/jump pad sequences with no flat platforms between them so you had to redo like 3 minutes of a movement path before getting to that psuedo checkpoint. In spite of that, the game clues you in when you need to use Elika to do the double jump thing, and the movement paths aren't overly difficult so I never find myself redoing an area more than once or twice.
I can understand why they needed Elika on the crank to operate it. The whole synergy/couple thing. For the cranks, up = push, down = pull. As someone who's worked on games with cranks, I LOVE that it isnt tied to camera direction and this simple to use.
Camera not being able to be rotated behind you IS bothersome, BUT, in the places where you need to do a backjump, the camera has always pulled out and shown me that I need to do a wall jump. I LOVE the camera system in this game. It's simple, shows you where you need to go 80% of the time, it automatically changes when you change direction of where you're jumping to when in a movement path, and the only time when I needed to manually adjust the camera is when I'm running around on flat platforms. LOVE THE CAMERA
I never had problems with those extension rings. Since all the movement is automated, you're not really pressing the button to run on the wall, you're pressing the jump button to get to the wall. Hitting the ring just extends the movement. I dunno, it took some slight getting used to in the beginning of the game, and I'm not having any problem with it anymore.
Shadows are weird. They DON'T need outlines. Sometimes Elika has a worse shadow than the prince. Like, 8 bit jaggy bad shadow. Other times, it's not as bad. No idea what's up with that.
Agree on the lack of enemies, or at least, different tactics of the same enemies. They all behave the same, except some go into their whole stance bit, but even then... Combat is formulaic, unless you're trying to find out new combos. Reinforces my theory of them basing this game not on combat but exploration and traversal.
I love the compass sparkly thing. Never had it go through walls, floors, or led me to an area that I didn't have set as the target on the map. Go punch the ubi QA guys. I hardly ever have to use this anyway, except when reaching junctions so I know generally which way to go.
For all the positives, agree. Whatever cloth tech you're using STILL causes it to pass through the character model sometimes. As far as I can tell, this has always happened in past PoP games. But it is still tons better than previous games.
All in all, thoroughly LOVING the game. Just hoping the last power I unlock isn't so... out there, as flying is.
