Announcements - An Interview with our Level Design Department

Tom M: I remember Erik (our Creative Director) asking my opinion of the game when I first joined. I commented about the environment, and that it would be cool to have world damage to the player and player damage to the world - a deeper interaction. The labyrinth answers that quite well, since suddenly the whole environment is out to thwart your progress. It's not just traps, but pathways squeezing around them, and the available space, and the darkness. We had a lot of areas being re-factored like the Prison and Crypt and Chamber of Sins. One addition was blocking fences and gates, to prevent movement skills skipping around traps, though there was some notable gaps here and there. A player reported on the forum there was a bug on gold key doors, that you could skip passed by jumping over a wall gap, and everyone was like "Why did you report that!?" So we didn't just design it, we're still working on it and responding to feedback and making additional content.

Chris G: It's a pretty complex structure, as Josiah said it's dynamic, as it changes every day, and it also uses the standard PoE random features. But on top of that we needed to have a bit of control on some of these rooms in order to categorise them into types (combat room, or trap room etc…) so that when it gets generated it's not just putting a bunch of trap rooms one after another, that would make a lot of rage quitting happen… It was a challenge for the team to create traps that were hard and punishing enough but still remained fun. It was also a bit tricky to make it so that players wouldn't just want to skip through the whole trap section thinking "ain't nobody got time for this", we had to make sure it was worth going through and not just a simple speed bumps section.

How can an aspiring level designer break into the industry?

Josiah D: When I first started doing this, there was really poor educational support, and the skills required were difficult to pick up without just starting from nothing. Few companies will hire people to learn how to do a job, and so most of the level designers I know started at their companies as QA or other "entry level" positions that companies are willing to hire for without previous experience. Education continues to improve, but you should probably be aware that there are a bunch of cranky old level designers with a very dim view of for-profit universities and the "skills" that they teach people.

Aside from getting a job, learning level design is much more straightforward. Grab a game with excellent content creation tools like Starcraft II, Divinity: OS, Monaco, etc. Go make some levels and get your friends (or anyone you can) to play them, see if you can make something that your players find fun. If you're willing to put even more work learning slightly more obtuse tools, Valve's Source Engine or Unity will let you build just about anything, and practice your general game design as well as content creation.

Tom M: That's a deep question, because level design has many features you need to show you can do, and there are also different personality types in this work. For example, most of our designers can code and have a good mind for gameplay mechanics, but I'm definitely light on scripting and more into landscape art and world building. I've forced myself to learn at least some basics of programming and it helps amazingly. Nowadays I believe learning procedural art tools like Substance is beneficial, and a lot of studios seem to have adopted it. I notice I don't make half as much art as I used to, since we have an art team who are all awesome. But to show you can produce or assemble or orchestrate good levels as a designer requires you to be able to at least handle or process the art assets. I'm lucky to have teammates who can analyse problems and faults on what's broken or buggy, to diagnose issues, so I would say that's a great skill to develop. In a way, the thing you are worst at is what you should be trying to train up. Maybe it is worth mentioning that it helps to move to where the work is. It's a step to make yourself more employable.

Chris G: I'm old school when it comes to getting into the industry, and might be borderline "cranky old level designer" as Josiah puts it.

I got into the industry as a QA intern on a French MMORPG. From there I just made friends with the designers and showed them the maps I was making on my spare time in Unreal Tournament and got into the LD team.

I'm not a big believer in learning level design in a school, but whether you go through a game school or not, the most important thing is: make stuff.

Doesn't matter what it is: a Unreal FPS map, a starcraft simple terrain, a 2d clone of crappy bird… whatever.

Make, fail, repeat. That's how you learn. That's also how you're going to build your portfolio.

Once you think you have enough stuff you consider "decent", show it to as many people as you can. Apply for junior level design jobs and show them your levels, they might not hire you but it will push you to polish your stuff and learn more, go to local game dev conventions and talk to people, show them your stuff, get their feedback.

If I'm hiring level designers, I'd rather hire a guy with no industry experience but a kick ass maps portfolio rather than someone with a fancy diploma who hasn't done anything except a design document in Word for a school project.

What can we look forward to in the future of Path of Exile's level design?

Josiah D: We just added a bunch of neat tools for interactive elements in levels, and we hope to use them for more optional puzzles and other tricky things. We're going to support and improve the Labyrinth. We've got a big update for that coming soon. The next major things we're working on outside of there will be more along our usual lines of super variable terrain and monster based challenges for future content. We've got some cool terrain coming, and we're making sure it's fun to play on as well as look at =)

Tom M: Significantly more animated environment features is definitely something I'd love to see. We have a lot of new staff recently, so it's getting easier to create more content faster.

Chris G: More content coming: new locations, new challenges, more interactivity in the levels!

https://p7p4m6s5.ssl.hwcdn.net/public/news/26-04-2016/LevelDesign.jpg

From Left to Right: Josaiah, Chris, Tom

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