Dan Thomas - Level Designer

[TheDanAffair]

Hi! Just joined mapcore after lurking a few weeks now, loving the community so far, glad to now be a part of it! I just updated my portfolio to more work that I've been doing recently since before it had only one piece on it, and would love to hear people tear it apart, anything they can think of I'd love to hear!

 

http://thedanaffair.com/

[SuperDuperYeah]

Hey Dan !

 

Welcome to teh Mapcore. You really do know how to write ! The big positive point that I’d like to bring is the fact that you thoroughly explained your design decisions in each of your projects. That’s something that I always like to read because it demonstrates how you think as a level designer. I do have a few advice for you.

 

When I first opened your website that’s what I saw: “Dan Thomas” and bunch of text. Until now and taking in consideration I didn’t come from Mapcore I have no idea what you do. That’s quickly fixable by adding some kind of sub text like “Dan Thomas / Level Designer”. This is just so that I know from which angle to judge your stuff.

 

The next thing is the bunch of text sitting on the landing page. You’ll probably get that from everyone here at Mapcore, but most of the time you would put your work section as your landing page so that anybody that’s looking to employ you won’t have to look for your work. Imagine anyone looking at your portfolio like the most impatient and laziest human being (HR doesn’t have a whole lot of time to look at portfolios). The fastest they can reach your work the better it is.

 

Your work section is the tightest section but I do have a few recommendations. You have huge images of your level in your UDK project, why not put some annotations on them so I can quickly browse through the page to understand your designs? I have a level analysis section in my webpage where I annotate every image and support it with text. Someone can have a general idea of what I’m bringing in like 2 seconds but can get more polished explanations in written form if they want to. Making the text bigger also eases the reading for your audience.

 

The next thing that I thought is that your advance wars section has a lot of text. Try focusing it into a shorter form like in bullet points. I would be a lot more inclined to read it if it wasn’t in a paragraph style form. Again annotations would be cool.

 

My following recommendations concern your resume. There’s a lot of stuff in there and there’s a few things I would take out especially the things that don’t directly concern game development. HR usually doesn’t take in consideration your experience outside game dev unless it is a field that is tied with it in some ways (Film, VFX, any kind of post-production thingy you can think of). So I would definitely take out LEGO specialist and Assistant Cook. Your technical skills section might need a bit of rework too. I wouldn’t put Windows as a technical skill it’s just a given in my opinion. I would personally make sure that every skill you state can be demonstrated. If you use Photoshop mention that you made the textures for one of your levels, if you use any of the Autodesk software show us how you used them in your levels. ActionScript 3, JavaScript, Unity, Hammer, Construct 2 make sure you show us how you used your skills in order to produce content as a level designer. What you can do is state at what level of professionalism you are with each of those skills and take out those that you feel you're the weakest in.

 

Last thing. Resume > Other Affiliations & Recognition > again I would stick with only what’s relevant to the gaming industry. Being a Soccer Referee doesn’t tell me much about you as a professional game developer. That’s probably something you could mention at some point in an interview if they start asking you about what you like to do outside of game development. Same thing goes for a resume and portfolio keep it short and effective.

 

You’re definitely in the right way with what I read in your work section. Keep it up !

 

GOSH this the longest portfolio review I’ve done. I apologize if it scared you. I really took the time to review your website though.

 

 

Antoine

[acetamino]

Didnt expect to see another Burlington, VT! Maybe I'll see you at three needs or another bar one of these days! Best of Luck

[TheDanAffair]

Thanks Antoine, really appreciate the concerns and feedback you gave! I've since cleaned a lot of your critiques up, still getting around to tidying up some aspects of it (I want a video walkthrough of both of my stages up in some form ideally, and working on better descriptions, mainly) but on the whole I'm a lot more pleased with it as it is now. I was a little confused with how annotated you suggested some of the work be. Is annotating the screenshots directly a preference, or letting the screenshots speak for themselves and the descriptions aid in that? I feel like going in and marking what's what for every screenshot could get cluttered and detract from displaying the core and actual content of my projects.

 

Either way, thanks so much for the feedback! Constantly adding more to it and asking for more feedback if necessary/notable, but here is my next draft/iteration!

 

http://thedanaffair.com/

[SuperDuperYeah]

Oh hellou Dan ! Awesome changes you've made and glad I could help you out. Yeah so for the annotations it's more like... directly explaining what your idea was for this particular portion of your level. Sometimes when I look at level pictures I'd be like... "those are nice pictures, but what did he want the player to do there". Taken out of context... i.e. I haven't played the level, I can't totally understand what's happening unless it's super SUPER obvious. I'd probably won't annotate my screenshots if I was a level artist or an environment artist because I know I'm supposed to look at the stuff and just find it pretty (nothing stops them from doing construction shots though see this dudes portfolio: http://www.scotthomer.co.uk/). But since we are... moments creators (in some ways *cheesy quote fingers*) it's just better to quickly explain or annotate the pictures to say "look here I used this to do this" or "this is what the player should do" or "I paced down the gameplay by doing this". Support your stuff with arrows pointing at the things. It shows that you understand what you're doing.If you're worried about clustering your pictures you could put little numbers and write down a short little phrase describing the action or the context. But you know... they're not guidelines it's just something that I find effective especially with people taking 30 seconds to look over portfolios. Text just scares them haha.