I got into level design almost by chance, I’d say. When I started studying games I didn’t know what field I wanted to go into. I knew I wasn’t going to be a programmer or artist since I was never good at programming and I can’t draw to save my life. However, coming from designing my own tabletop games since a very young age, game design seemed very natural to me. I quickly learned that being a game designer isn’t easy and most companies out there consider it a more senior role. Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong – who was my head teacher at Futuregames – started talking to us about level design and I quickly realized that this was something for me. Ever since my early days of playing World of Warcraft, I’d always been more drawn towards the worlds of games rather than their characters and systems. There’s something about the way you can tell a story with an environment that always seemed way more powerful to me than the stories we tell with words.

So, at that point, I decided I was going to focus on level design and that’s the role I took on in all my projects at the school. I quickly found out that level design was a way for me to fit into the pipeline of game production in a way that felt natural and comfortable for me. I was working both with artists and scripters and never found myself doing the same thing two days in a row. I found that I could make a difference and impact the player’s experience in a really creative and flexible way just by using the editor. It was very direct and powerful for me. And I’ve not looked back since.

Level Design

I think level design is a really hard role to nail down. There’s just so much that you have to be good at in order to be a good level designer and there’s no way that everyone can be good at everything. That’s generally why you often have a team of several level designers doing different things on one game, or sometimes even one level. And apart from just the very different skills that you have to master, you also have to take the studio you’re working at into consideration. How close do you work with environment art and lighting artists? Do you just block out a level and call it a day or are you there for every step of the way? You’re sort of poking at so many different disciplines just by the very nature of what it is you have to accomplish as a level designer. It’s very hard to define where you draw the line and how you actually define what you do. I think you’ll often find that level design doesn’t mean the same thing at every company and that can sometimes be problematic as there can be some disconnect with what is expected of you and what you’re actually capable of.

I do think there are some fundamentals that every level designer has to really be good at and find natural in order to become successful. You have to have a great sense of pacing and player experience. You have to, no matter how tired or uninspired you’re feeling, be able to put yourself in the player’s shoes and try to imagine how they’re going to experience your content. If you’re not able to do that I think you simply won’t be very successful. No matter how much user testing you do, if you don’t have that ability to understand what a player wants at any given time or how they’re being affected by your pacing curve, you’re going to have a hard time.

I also think a good level designer has to master composition. This is something that really comes into play in all stages of the level creation process. If you don’t understand composition you won’t be able to guide the player through a space and you won’t be able to make a level look appealing. Guiding a player is arguably the most important thing that a level designer has to do and if you don’t master composition you’re going to struggle with that. Without an understanding of composition, you might also end up creating very technically messy levels that won’t run well as you’ll often struggle and throw the kitchen sink in to accomplish the vision. If you master composition you’ll have a much easier time finding the best way forward when you’re composing your layout and art and thus won’t clutter it with unnecessary geometry or lighting or what have you.