Level Design Workflow Questions
I graduate in roughly 10 weeks and have decided to focus mainly on a level design track. I have a few questions regarding exactly what I need to show in a portfolio/reel.
My understanding is that Level Designers in general need to be focused more on gameplay, triggers, and scripting, and leave texturing and modeling to people in those respective fields. I have a hard time presenting an untextured level, but I have heard on more than one occasion that that is expected. Is that accurate? I have no issues creating my own textures, but in the short time I have remaining I would like to complete some higher quality work as quickly as possible.
I will post my progress here, Thank You for any help/Guidance.
Concept:
My understanding is that Level Designers in general need to be focused more on gameplay, triggers, and scripting, and leave texturing and modeling to people in those respective fields. I have a hard time presenting an untextured level, but I have heard on more than one occasion that that is expected. Is that accurate? I have no issues creating my own textures, but in the short time I have remaining I would like to complete some higher quality work as quickly as possible.
I will post my progress here, Thank You for any help/Guidance.
Concept:
Replies
Anyway, these are pretty cool for showing the starting phase, but if you want to make levels you need to show levels. Much the same as a character artist might concept a character, they still need to be able to create that character within a game environment.
Also, the level of detail which you present your levels at needs to be based on where you want to work. Some places consider designers just designers. Others consider them more like level artists as well, in the sense of placing everything to make it pretty.
I 100% agree with that. Although you may find some studios do it differently. If you can't do great modeling or textures I would leave it out, it will just drag down the overall quality of the level.
You could use a generic tileable measurment texture or just take shots in the shaded (lighting only) view.
I would focus on good puzzles,story and scripting.
My 2c.
Oh hey, you're the guy with that busted portfolio. Should probably go back and fix that sometime.
[/ QUOTE ]
Yes that would be my busted portfolio. Thats on my list I promise.
So I've decided to compromise and use as many of my own textures as possible, and as few Unreal assets as possible.
Crypt-
New hotness:
join a project and do stuff. many mods out there that could use some more help.
since you're doing something for school with a deadline, focus in only one level. if you try to do more than one, you'll just get lost, frustrated and screwed up. do the traditional workflow, blocking out and then detailing, you'll be just fine. 10 weeks is enough time do pull it out.
take a day to think about the level you're about to start. have realistic goals and make sure it's really what you want to do, write down notes, make sketches. that helps detecting concept problems that could be a major pain in the ass in the future. if you feel like, you can share those with us so we can do the possible, based on our previous experience, to help you out.
This is just not true for many companies. Many of our level designers are terrible at making art.
You could make a level completely out of someone else's assets and our company wouldn't care at all. Here It's the level artist's job to make it look pretty not the designers.
It certainly helps if your levels are presented as part of a mod that looks stunning but the most important thing about trying for a level design job is, suprisingly, the level design.
So keep on making stuff!
Alex
comments on that would be awesome as well.