Level Design Survey Results

[Hourences]

The Results:

http://www.hourences.com/book/surveyresults.htm

(Dozens of charts below all that text!)

Thanks to all who participated.

There were around a 1000 participants in this survey, of those, 58 percent were level designers or artists. The remaining 42 percent were gamers and developers involved in other aspects of development. Of the 58 percent, 27 percent were professional level designers (152 professionals).

[-HP-]

Very interesting man, thank you for doing this!

[dux]

Yeah! LD's are the best!

[ReNo]

Ah, glad to see the results of this Looks like you got a pretty good response to it too - ~1000 is a decent number to work off.

[Furyo]

I think some of these are definitely skewed by the fact most people who took the test are modders or modders and pros at the same time, answering mainly as modders. But it is a good exercise regardless, makes for some good figures to take a snapshot of what being a modder means today

[Algor]

Interesting results. Like Furyo, I definitely get the feeling that these results stem from lots of mod level designer input. Either way, it was neat to check it out. I can only say thank god that "Not knowing what to do" won the single-player problems.

[⌐■_■]

interesting. thanks!

[Hourences]

The report mentions that some of these are indeed skewed because of too high number of modders who took it.

[Psy]

Forty-nine percent became professional level designers by starting out in the mod community. Only 18 percent graduated from a game development course. Fourteen percent graduated from a related course (for example a multimedia course). Only a very mere 5 percent of the people rolled into the position through QA, so unlike it is often claimed, QA does not seem to be a common way to break into the industry, at not least for level designers.

Awesome stuff, good sir.

[Furyo]

The report mentions that some of these are indeed skewed because of too high number of modders who took it.

I know I know, I did read the whole thing. I was just further emphasizing that

[Izuno]

thanks for that. great great survery and if you can do it again for only pros in the industry, or at least segment all the charts out by pros/modders, that would be awesome. we need more research like this. looking forward to what you do next.

[Hourences]

Yeah I know, but it is very challenging to split all results into categories (pro/amateur, what community, how much experience, etc..) because that would make a huge list of answers, and also I don't think the software actually supports it.

The last ten or so questions were actually answered exclusively by pros btw.

I think I will create a Part 2 in a couple of months. I will have it cool down for a while, come up some questions, and then kick of Part 2.

If anyone has any questions they would really like to see added, tell me!

[st0lve]

How about you send emails to different companies and ask them to do it.

And then send tests to gamers etc. to see what people actually want.

Nobody cares about the designers tbh, but everyone cares about communities.