 My
Leap Into Level Design
By Tim Carter (15 Jan 2007)
At the Christmas party of
Kaos
Studios in New York City over the holidays
I told one of the level designers this: I had always wanted to
get into level design but had never made the leap. But by the
end of the holidays, I was up to my eyeballs in it.
First, my reasons
were manifold for not getting into level design. Well, yes I had
tinkered with it back in
2001, making a Counter-Strike map using Worldcraft, so I
knew all the core theory and issues behind occlusion and brushes
and whatnot. I had picked up information and tips about level
design from the people I worked with (I designed the layout of
the fictional hospital and emergency department for
Code Orange, taking into account
the subject matter necessities [like where the trauma units
is in relation to surgery and so on], but also the need to
separate the map into zones for occlusion purposes [to not overload the user's graphics
card]); I learned from designers at BreakAway, and so on. But level design wasn't my main area of
focus.
What always set me apart was my ability to do
hardcore, from-the-ground-up game design - so that was always
the place I put my effort into, and got my gigs from. Basically,
I am a generalist game designer with a lot of experience doing
the research and the fundamental design required to make totally
new games.
Still, there were games I would always
love to make levels for - not all of them super-realistic ones.
Take Rune,
for instance (a great game I keep intending to write an article
on). Plus, production-oriented work is
second nature to me - once I get the hang of whatever process
I'm supposed to master. I have done
tons of work in web design, graphic design, film (digital, video and the real
celluloid stuff), even ordinary carpentry, drafting for
architecture, and modeling and painting miniature vehicles and
soldiers. I have technical instincts.
Anyway, Kaos is making
Frontlines: Fuel of War using the nextgen version of the
Unreal engine, but the aforementioned level designer complained
it was buggy. He recommended I learn on Unreal 2004. So over the
holidays, I crash-coursed myself in level design on Unreal. I
picked up the game (which ships with the UnrealEd 3 editor),
ordered a
hefty book called
Mastering Unreal Technology: The Art of Level Design,
and downloaded a copy of Maya 7 Personal Learning Edition.
With that I set out to learn level design. So
let me show you what I made in my spare time over the past
couple weeks...
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