Steve Lee’s Post

Deja vu, either we talked about this before or did you make a video in the past on this?

Good on you for stating this Steve. The last few years have been a remarkable period of democratization of tools that were before only available to few industries. With this there has been an explosion of people experimenting with them and falling in love with the images they can now quickly generate. I do not think this is a bad thing, on the contrary. I also believe that it is very easy for people to get carried awash with the tools and reside on the surface of their ‘art’ while forgetting to search deeper into its foundations. ‘Nothing easy is worth fighting for’. This is happening in other industries where titles are being diluted for the sake of views or likes. I went to architecture school, earned my bachelors and masters and worked in architecture for almost a decade before going into film. However I do not have a license and therefore I have never referred to myself as an ‘architect’. That would be diluting the merits of architects out there. Words do matter and do make an impact.

Exactly this. Many people seem to think level design is a form of decorating with no real connection to gameplay, and think level designers can be easily replaced with procedural generation. I've even been on projects where leads and managers all the way up to the top could not grasp that there is no point in doing level design when we haven't yet nailed down how the game will play or even some basic mechanics. I like to think about the interaction of game mechanics, level and enemy design like the construction of a sentence. If the verbs define what the player can do (game mechanics) the nouns are what the player can do those things *to* (level design and enemies.) Mario *jumps over* a pipe; Mario *jumps onto* a turtle. Without having decided the game is about jumping, there's no reason to even have the pipe or the turtle.

Completely agree, this is something that really annoys me personally. There seems to be no understanding that a space must be functional and facilitate gameplay, which means many hours or painful design and testing. I've seen many portfolio pieces where someone has taken asset packs and made something that looks pretty, but there is no gameplay nor mechanical design associated with the scene. I wouldn't mind if they just called it environment art and refered to themselves as environment artists, but its when they claim to be level designers. That's what annoys me.

Very true. I never went down the art or design route but did mod for a while, while I tried to find my way in the industry. I realised all the levels I built were very convoluted, confusing or just plain boring layouts with terrible item placement and player leading/game flow. I spent most of my time beautifying the thing. So they looked nice, but they were log to play 🤣

I love this! This is one of the problems in the industry that i noticed. Both people from out and inside of the company approach and ask level designers questions like "can you explain me what is it that you actually do" and that is why there will always be videos with dressing storytelling, worldbuilding and env art standing in the shoes of an LD. Your videos and lectures on youtube greatly help the LD community, but i think we need more LDs to help define the job for the general game dev ppl and public

You could go one step further and just call it art. Just art.

It baffles me that so many of those videos use level design in the title. I nearly fell into the trap of conducting my design in the same way when I was starting out, so I hope this video makes a few people avoid that pit trap!

This could also be considered world building as well. But the fact you can’t even walk around these spaces (which are bascially a movie set) it’s not even world building either. It’s concept art.

Someone had to say It. 😅 So true.