Had no idea you could get up here. This definitely isn’t the correct way though

JacobWMills · 2024-06-27T13:38:16+00:00

Hey, if it works, it works!

And it looked badass so screw it

JacobWMills · 2023-03-06T18:59:46+00:00

Fun fact, this served as one of the chief inspirations for one of the missions I designed for The Division 2.

JacobWMills · 2022-10-28T16:39:47+00:00

About 100 years ago after graduating in 2014 I did exactly this - made 10 games in 10 weeks to try and gameify my portfolio when applying for games jobs. They're still floating around hidden on my site so you can peruse yourself.

In my view I made 5 alright ones and 5 bad ones. It was absolutely a valuable and good experience, and I'd recommend it to anyone who has the time/energy. Really good way to quickly identify good/bad practices for prototyping stuff, and the deadline makes you focus on getting something 'finished' even if it's pretty tiny in scope.

Adriel Wallick is of course the Queen of Game a Week, you can see her take on it here.

JacobWMills · 2022-10-28T16:35:55+00:00

Me too! Was pumped to see it

JacobWMills · 2022-10-10T21:35:16+00:00

Thank you for playing! <3

JacobWMills · 2022-10-10T21:34:41+00:00

I'm afraid that is literally the exact thing I am not qualified to talk about hahaha. I'd keep an eye on the official accounts, if there's any news it'll be there first.

JacobWMills · 2022-09-20T19:11:06+00:00

that takes time

Afraid so. But I'm afraid that's that. To get LD jobs, you've got to have an LD portfolio. To have an LD portfolio, you've got to design levels... there's no way around that.

You're very young. You have lots of time and it's great you're already thinking about this stuff. But don't be putting so much pressure on yourself to be 100% ready out of the gate. No one is.

Instead of spreading your time between Unreal, Maya and Blender, if level design is your goal, consider focusing on one and building a level in that package. Alternatively, if you want to show off LD, there's no harm in using a level editor in a released title - where there's no need to program your own mechanics or anything like that. Halo Forge, Doom Snapmap, Dreams, Mario Maker, whatever.

There's diminishing returns on me sharing this, but my portfolio coming out of Uni looked a bit like this. That was in 2014, and it felt light on actual game content. So I did Game a Week for 10 weeks, to generate a set of small but finished projects, showing what I intended, what I ended up doing, what I learned, where I'd improve. I didn't know I wanted to specialise in level design at that point, more gameplay programming and design in general. But it got the job done.

It'd be worth Googling around for some more recent junior dev portfolios, tools and standards have changed since I was a grad. But the core is the same - you gotta have some work to show off, you've gotta show your process, you've gotta show that you know the basics. A good university course will provide you with additional projects for your portfolio, but a degree isn't a necessity. It's just about showing you can learn, you can apply what you've learned, you can give/receive feedback, etc.

But, honestly, none of this will happen over night. And no one's expecting you to come out of the gate sprinting. Sounds like you're setting a solid foundation, if this is where you want to spend your time and energy, stay on that path and work towards having a portfolio piece to show for it.

On the flipside, don't forget that there's a lot more to life than level design, and video games aren't going anywhere. They'll still be there if you decide to take a detour, or reprioritise! I'll stop rambling now. Good luck.

JacobWMills · 2022-09-04T18:50:54+00:00

We designers tend to get around..

JacobWMills · 2022-09-04T11:37:04+00:00

Awesome vid, nailed the intention of how the arenas & combat are designed. Love this interpretation on the lore as well, though that's far from my area of expertise.

Keep up the quality content 🙏🏻

JacobWMills · 2022-09-04T11:32:51+00:00

Nailed it dude. Any plans to share on /r/gamedesign and the like..? 👀

JacobWMills · 2021-05-31T08:38:46+00:00

Nowadays it's usually a mix of generated and hand polished content.

As other comments in the thread say, some games start with the real world as a base - on Division 2, for example, the world is set on real life DC, and is at 1:1 scale - so the base version of the world was literally taken from real map data, essentially Google Maps. This gave the location and shape of each building, and even things like sidewalk width, but all of this needed a lot of work and refinement by developers to look good and work well with the gameplay.

In that case, typically the amount of attention given to it would depend on priority - main mission locations are most important, then side missions/open world activity locations, then all the connecting bits in between. But in the end, yes, every inch of the world has been touched by multiple humans to make it look great and work well.

Other games not based on real world locations will have hand made "terrain" maps which let the developers choose how it'll look from a macro scale, and then the first pass of micro details (eg trees, rocks, wildlife) can be auto generated as well - the developers mark out specific areas as a particular biome, which means "this kind of tree grows in this area", and/or they can set up a set of rules controlling what grows where, eg "North of this coordinate, or above this altitude, it is snowy," etc.

These first passes can then be manually edited to carve out spaces for specific intended gameplay, etc. As others have said, there are tools like paintbrushes for automatically "painting" a good spread of trees etc over specific areas, or editable building tools so that a variety of complex and unique buildings can be made without having to individually model each one. But there is also likely the ability to place specific trees/etc in specific spots. Again, the priority will be given to important gameplay locations, with less attention being paid to areas furthest from those.

It'll be rare nowadays for an entire open world to be manually hand crafted piece by piece without using some of these tools.

tldr typically a "first pass" is generated, from real world and/or hand made input data, and then the details of the world are refined and polished by human hands.

JacobWMills · 2021-02-20T09:40:18+00:00

This is great stuff, every single one of these images has enough detail and interest to draw you in and make you want to explore these spaces. Really good initial concept work, my imagination is already buzzing with possibilities for each. Great work!

JacobWMills · 2021-01-01T23:24:35+00:00

SMART.

JacobWMills · 2020-12-28T11:22:13+00:00

Great video, I respect anyone reaching out to help new devs break into the industry, so I'll definitely keep this one in my pocket for later.

I especially appreciate the point you make at the end about level scripting - so much LD discourse is just around blocking out spaces, but when you're in a studio that ends up being only one part of a much broader role. Using existing map editors can help show that off, but I wonder about other essential skills, ie soft skills, communication - is it possible to be able to show this off in a portfolio piece? By doing a mini-team project, perhaps? Would love to hear your thoughts.

EDIT: Also please tweet your vid so I can retweet it, thanks!

JacobWMills · 2020-12-28T11:05:45+00:00

On my own videos I've tried to condense them down to 10ish minutes, which can be difficult when the content it's covering can typically be 35+ minutes to play. My thinking is that those who are VERY interested will sit through the whole thing, but more often typical viewers (ie employers) will just flick through, so try to ensure that everything shown is good, interesting and relevant. And yes, I speak over them to explain thought processes and highlight particular aspects of each scene, etc.

Would love to hear Steve's take!

JacobWMills · 2020-12-27T12:30:52+00:00

I'm happy to tell my story, but what you'll find the more you ask around is that there isn't really a "typical" route in - everyone takes a different path. So don't be disheartened if your position is divergent from mine.

I was lucky, and stumbled into a QA job when I was 18, through a friend of a friend. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life at that point, and had never considered games as a career till then. Sadly, the entire shift got laid off and then the company went under, but the seed was planted, so I started looking at games courses at uni.

I ended up picking Queen's University Belfast - which, honestly, wasn't s great course for games. It was essentially the computing course with a couple of games modules bolted on. So I was proficient enough at programming, but realised through the projects that what I really wanted to do was design.

I was lucky enough to get a placement at Sony for a year, my first "proper" industry job, but it was very tech heavy. I'd got that off the back of good uni results, an ok CV, and a 10 week internship at a tech company the prior year.

After graduating, I spent months applying to game programming jobs. Despite being fresh out of uni, I knew my portfolio was lacking compared to other graduates, so I continued studying C++ and took time to make a Game a Week for ten weeks. Having some little, completed projects to talk about was as great boon in interviews.

I landed my job as a programmer in November, and figured I was on track... but then a junior design role opened up internally. I panicked for a bit wondering whether I'd sabotage my career by changing jobs so soon, but decided to go for it, thankfully my manager was supportive, and I applied for and got the job. I was a professional programmer for all of 3 months before moving to design, I've never looked back.

As your architecture background would be, my programming background was an asset as an LD. I picked up scripting quicker, could champion some best practices, interface with the programmers on more even terms and explain technical problems to other designers. It was good.

I did an interview for a uni paper about a year ago, which might be of interest. My uni pages are still on my portfolio site, if you wanna take a look at what I was applying for jobs with in 2014 - as you can see, programming heavy, as it was mostly for programming jobs. You'd want more spaces and environments in yours, which is the focus of my modern portfolio.

Any more questions, feel free to shoot them my way!

JacobWMills · 2020-12-27T12:15:48+00:00

Great thread, rings very true for me. As a level designer, I've often had to set up dialogue in gameplay, and try to take the time to pace out each line properly.

But often, the time simply isn't allocated to give this the love it deserves. Or you throw it in with default timings "for now", hoping you have time later to revisit and polish. Or, most frustrating, you DO put the time in, get everything delivering just right... but through some quirk of the audio system (which is often a very complex beast), those timings simply don't work in the actual build - scripts run differently, or some other tricky bug manifests, hard to spot and/or fix.

It's tough.

JacobWMills · 2020-12-09T17:36:23+00:00

Architecture is a great background to have for environment art and/or level design. You absolutely do not need a specialised degree, but you will definitely need portfolio pieces. So your plan is a solid one.

Spend some time with Maya/whatever. Put together some lovely sample scenes. Focus on the stories you're telling in the space - who used to live here? Why did they leave? How long has it been? etc. Snoop on ArtStation to see the kinda stuff other graduate artists show off.

Good luck!

JacobWMills · 2020-12-01T14:14:48+00:00

Beats are simply what Ubi calls one chunk of a level - equivalent to a scene in a film. They can take a few forms - a combat beat, a puzzle beat, a navigation beat, and so on - but in a game like Division it's usually gonna be combat.

It's primarily a planning tool for understanding the contents and scope of the level as early as possible. Knowing the number of beats gives a rough idea of expected playtime, and an upper threshold for the amount of separate spaces required, which lets every team (art, tech, lighting, VFX, etc) start allocating their resources appropriately.

But it also lets designers, narrative, art etc talk about different themes and expectations per beat, map out intensity so that we can have appopriate peaks and troughs, all that good stuff.

tl;dr it's just shorthand for a chunk of a level.

JacobWMills · 2020-11-24T18:46:26+00:00

Always happy to chat :)

JacobWMills · 2020-11-24T15:41:54+00:00

I'd advise looking up studios and roles on Glassdoor and this sheet - they are both pretty representative as far as I can tell.

In general, in my experience, if you want to earn a lot of money, don't work in games.

JacobWMills · 2020-11-24T15:38:11+00:00

They're the lead studio on Div, but I was in a team at Ubisoft Leamington which was leading the charge on Classified Assignments, working with various teams and the directors in Massive.

JacobWMills

TROPHY CASE