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Trying Your Hand at Level Design?
Utawoutau asks: "As a student nearing graduation with high interest yet no game industry experience I have been taking a serious look at the position of Level Designer. In order to apply for such a position of course, I would need an impressive portfolio. I am aware that a number of games, Neverwinter Nights for example, come packaged with level development tools and that a number of other games have tools (official or not) that are readily available on the Internet. I am interested in hearing opinions from others that have experimented with the level design tools for a number of games as to what they found the easiest, the most fun, the most in depth, and the most impressive to work with. In particular, I am interested in a game whose tools strike a good balance between all four of the above criteria."
If you've never designed a level before, how did you hit on the idea of designing them for a living?
(I don't mean this as a flame; I'm just curious.)
This sounds a bit like those tales pr0n stars tell about how much it sucks (no pun intended) to work in that business.
Sure, you get to fuck a lot of really hot women, but you have to work long (no pun intended) hours under adverse conditions, and if you fail just once you might never get another job in that business.
I don't think that most of us would expect the video game business to be well, all fun and games, we expect that like most jobs there will be aspects to it that supremely suck ass.
People who want to work in that business have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Though I'll concede that reality can be even more harsh than what they expect.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You're right on the money, but the good news is that you can make games as a hobby, and if you ARE god, you'll be able to turn it into a living. You don't have to work your way up through the ranks if you don't want to. You can have fun making your own games, and if they take off you'll either be able to form your own company or get work at one. Personally, I think the ideal situation is to form a mod team with some guys you like, and churn out mods in your free time for popular games. If stuff like Valve's Steam really takes off, it may even be that you can remain independent mod makers and make money off of it by selling your games online only.
Yeah, except people don't realize that being a game programmer is pretty much the same as being a word processor programmer, the only difference is in the functions that you call. You probably won't even get to play the game you're working on until it's almost done, and by then you'll be so sick of working 80 hour weeks on it you'll probably never want to see it again.
You get a lot of idealistic kids coming out of high school/college thinking they want to write video games because they like to play them, which is about as stupid a conclusion as you can draw. Nevermind most game production houses are really small, hire maybe one or two people a year, and when they do you've gotta be a guru. Christ, you practically need a master's degree in mathematics to mess with the 3d engines these days. Besides, in 5 years, they'll probably replace all the programmers with people in India.