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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."
A little off topic I would say. Now, if you created a SCO mod which put the SCO exec staff as the monsters in a variant of the UT2003 invasion type, that would be on topic, and amusing to actually play too!
First of all you have to have lots of experience in how the gameswork, and an artisticside. Good levels are very hard to do and they are done with lots of sweat from their makers, you have to weight in all the diffrent things in the game so that the level is a fun one, and beautiful.
This is not something you will get from getting a couple of tools that are easy to use, but from your own mind. That mind must also be able to adjust itself to the new tools, i.e. going from the worldcraft to new Radiant, and that will only be done if you have the time to do it.
The two biggest are Q3A and UT, check out the dev tools for them, they are equally good, just choose the one that suits you. If you want to dev for linux then you can get a very good start with GtkRadiant (the Q3A tool), but UnrealEd is very good as well alas only with windows support.
If you really want to advance in any sector of the gaming industry you need to learn the art of fellatio.