Level designer vs. Enviro artist
polycounter lvl 19
This might be a pretty silly question, but I'm just wondering if these are two separate jobs, and if so, what kind of things carry over onto the other. What are the specific skills that a level designer or environment artist would need to have?
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An environment artist on the other hand, creates the visual elements of a level. Say the designer puts a big block in the middle of a street and says "that's a car". It's the environment/prop artist's job to create that car.
Designers are the flow/gameplay, artists are the eyecandy.
Enviroment Artist - Creates the probs for a level
Level Designer - Using the SDK to combine all elements of the game.
An environment artist will do jobs like - create proxies for the level, place the actual objects in the maps, model + texture meshes, light the level, etc.
In my opinion an LD's main job is layout and scripting. An environment artist is the over all art and look of the level.
Personally I like the job to be combined.
I'm curious to see what Gauss has to say about this though.
the term "level designer" is largely bollocks when you're talking about games in general.
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Wow, I missed where that happened. I know lots of level designers and have credits as a level designer myself. Obviously not every game has em, but they're still there.
There's a fairly large difference in designing something like a combat system when compared with designing a level ya know? :P
the term "level designer" is largely bollocks when you're talking about games in general.
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Unless of course you're designing levels...in a game.
so yes. like so many other questions about this industry, the answer is "it depends."
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the term "level designer" is largely bollocks when you're talking about games in general.
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Unless of course you're designing levels...in a game.
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lol
While I don't 100% agree with danr, I can see where he's coming from. The term "level designer" is primarily from the old-school FPS gaming crowd, making maps in a map editor like Hammer, Radiant or UnrealEd for an FPS game.
A lot of companies (especially smaller ones) will have less defined roles, where a "level designer" might do a lot of environment art work, or an "environment artist" might end up doing a fair amount of level design.
When you get a big complex game, a level designer is more likely to be doing what people have mainly mentioned here - blocking out gameplay flow and scripting events that occur over the course of the level. In that case they will not usually be doing any environment art, and an environment artist on the same sort of project will just be making prop models and environmental textures, and not really worrying about the placement of things.
For PSP/DS projects, or games with very small levels, I'd imagine it's mostly an "environment artist" who will be doing a lot of layout work and general "putting the level together" stuff.
As with most things in our industry... it depends. Hugely.
Anytime you're working closely with another group of folks on the team it always helps to know how they think.
I don't believe that the notion of one or a few all-powerful designer/s painstakingly working out each facet of the game for everyone to follow to the letter has a huge amount of bearing these days - I believe its just as much down to the individual "designer" (I will not use the term level designer) to individually work up their bit of the game, just as an artist works up their characters or their environments, or the programmers work up their individual bits of arcane maths gubbins. That's where the idea of "level design" falls down, there's a fuck load more in a game to design and develop than your average "level". If I could do this romantic ideal of level design for a living, I'd be pissing myself laughing for seven hours a day (the other hour spent working out "flow" and placing exploding crates)
Admittedly, I'm working off experience and while i haven't worked on every type of game, I've worked on enough of a variety (platform,action, linear, free roaming, some tiny titles, some huge titles) to get a good idea of what I'm talking about
Oh and ;
"generally you should assume that "levels" don't really exist any more and the term you want to concentrate on is "designer" ...'
Note the word "generally". Simply, do not assume that every company you send applications to wants a level designer as you believe a level designer to be. You will quite possibly not enjoy the interview if you do. Assume that levels don't exist. Think about the game.
Most places I've worked at or know of in the UK often have a more fractured development pipeline than here in the states now. By fractured I mean much of the level building takes place in max or maya and a number of inhouse tools are used to composite the model assets and script the gameplay.
Or at least I suspect thats why Danr is so resolute in his explanation of the term being a misnomer.
Not that it matters as the terms are changing again and will continue to as technology advances further forward.
At work we have level designers who focus more on the initial shelling out of a level in BSP blocks and script the sequences of events.
We also have level designers who focus on the meshing/lighting of the gameplay shell levels with all the assets the environment artists, like myself, produce for them.
After their job is done the levels are handed on again to
ld's who focus on optimizing things like framerate and mesh placement, scripting to polish things up.
Others places work completly differently too.
Really the only difference is that some people are stronger with the technical aspect of level creation and some are better with the artistic aspect of it.
By fractured I mean much of the level building takes place in max or maya and a number of inhouse tools are used to composite the model assets and script the gameplay.
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while this is quite true for many aspects of development, i'm really referring to people who don't and cannot use max, maya or other art packages. I still wouldn't call them level designers, i'd call them designers.
fuck me, there's that word "level" again. Someone define it as an absolute, and i'll back off
EDIT - look, okay, i'll explain. I've had one too many "environment artist/level designer" applications land on my desk. Ususally i don't know what the fuck to do with them for either of the roles, they rarely (no bollocks to rarely, never) tick the required boxes. They're "i want to make games" applications. How? Where are your skills? Where will you best fit in? What do you want? You know how to make a level flow? Top. So does that bloke in the corner. And he builds crates for a living. What are you bringing to the party, wheres your insight, wheres the exciting notion of how to make a game pop, wheres the fucking spark that'll make a difference, wheres your ability to think on your feet and turn your head 180 degrees when required to make GAMES and work in DEVELOPMENT and buzz with crackling energy to crank out something fucking ace that doesn't listlessly drip with your grandad's fucking grey 90s arcade game semen
Therefore I'd suggest that a game like an MMORPG like World of Warcraft doesn't really have "levels" as such, since it's all tied in as part of a big interconnecting world that the player can move freely through. However it does have "instances" and memorable locations which could be looked at as discrete levels in themselves. For example as soon as you walk out of the wilderness through a cave into a dungeon, you're in a "level".
A game like Quake is the classic example of "levels" - each section having a start and end point and usually a distinctive style. You complete one section, move on to the next, it's pretty linear.
Similarly any game which has deathmatch maps could probably be classed as having "levels"... each one is a discrete enclosed arena.
I'd even go so far as to say that RTS games have "levels", except most people refer to them as "maps" (which can also be used for FPS games). Again they're closed off sections of gameplay.
Most 2d sidescrollers have "levels", I don't think I've ever seen one with a single huge continuous world. Similarly racing games have "levels", except you call them "tracks".
To quote Hourences, there are two types of "design" for any given game - there's the core design, which is stuff like how fast players can move, how powerful their weapons are, how much health they have... all that stuff which doesn't change. That stuff is done by "designers", the people who set down the rules.
The other type of design is the map design, which is what level designers are focussed on - they are given the set of "rules" to work with (as mentioned above), and they have to make something which the player can move through and interact with in a fun way according to those rules.
Of course, as has been mentioned before, this is the most basic possible breakdown of what a designer might do, and will vary hugely from company to company depending on what sort of games they make, how many employees they have, how complex their game is.
For smaller games and studios I reckon you'll often find a lot of overlap between "designer" and "level designer".
But in bigger places you will have the people who focus purely on "core design" (the gameplay features) and never touch a map/layout/level/world, and then the people who focus on working within the rules set out by the "core designers" to create a fun environment to play in. They are the "level designers", and I'd argue they exist in pretty much all companies, for a given value of "level".
It's one of those issues where it really just depends on your definitions... ie. not worth discussing really
For smaller games and studios I reckon you'll often find a lot of overlap between "designer" and "level designer.
But in bigger places you will have the people who focus purely on "core design" (the gameplay features) and never touch a map/layout/level/world, and then the people who focus on working within the rules set out by the "core designers" to create a fun environment to play in. They are the "level designers", and I'd argue they exist in pretty much all companies, for a given value of "level".
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i like the last 6 words of that. You're completely right. But i would push for companies to properly define these terms when it comes to advertising jobs, and people should be aware of exactly what you've said when applying for them ...
Do you design some gameplay then build the environment around it, or do you build the environment and then play a game in it?
As an aside to my obvious perspective - a community Quake map is often a new environment for predefined gameplay.
Then there's the whole "what came first: the environment or the 'level' design"
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... The design... Fitting gameplay to art just doesn't seem to work in my experience.
...or do you build the environment and then play a game in it?
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It seems to me that only a foolish developer would try that...
Although obviously in the design of a level, one of the processes is theme/setting/atmosphere, which kinda overlaps into environment art, but you can put all of that down on paper without ever making an asset, and then block out "gameplay flow" knowing roughly what the end-result environment will be.
This will also likely lead to more immersive levels since your level designer will have an idea of what key elements might make up the scenery (ie. set pieces, objectives/goals, room and corridor size/style, terrain features etc).
lets call them "flaps" instead
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...or do you build the environment and then play a game in it?
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It seems to me that only a foolish developer would try that...
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Polyphony Digital. Bizarre Creations. Climax.
All used Laguna Seca, a pre-existing environment and played their game in it. Foolish developers.
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...or do you build the environment and then play a game in it?
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It seems to me that only a foolish developer would try that...
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Polyphony Digital. Bizarre Creations. Climax.
All used Laguna Seca, a pre-existing environment and played their game in it. Foolish developers.
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no no no no, a game flap. Guns and that
(fuck my bollocks its a quarter to two. How did THAT happen?)
Polyphony Digital. Bizarre Creations. Climax.
All used Laguna Seca, a pre-existing environment and played their game in it. Foolish developers.
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Meh! You know what I meant. I'm referring to "flaps" (
This is almost as bad as Clinton debating the meaning of "is."
How can you have a game without levels? even pac-man and tetris have levels. The idea of a game without them blows my mind.
Semantics? Aye, very probably. In that case a level COULD POSSIBLY BE DEFINED as a discrete section that measures progress. Those are Flaps.
"that's level 23 out of the way ... whats next? Oh, 24. Done"
you see?
a hinged surface on the trailing edge of an airplane wing
Cat flap, a hinged flap that allows a cat to enter or leave a room or building
Butt flap, a separately removable part of underwear (un)covering the buttocks
Sprunghunt - PES/FIFA/Madden/MLB/NFL don't have levels, do they? They have pitches/courts
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The things these sports games have are covered by the encompassing term 'level'. If it's a different environment then it's a different level.
This includes the backgrounds in tetris which changed every so often.
I'm not calling them flaps as the definition is too broad.