What is Level Design?

What is Level Design, or Mapping?

Level design can be defined as the step in game design that brings all of the various content areas together, to form the complete interactive game environment. I am focusing on Level Design for the FPS (First-Person Shooter) game type, as  in Doom, Quake, Half-Life, And Unreal Tournament, etc.   A single game level or environment is commonly referred to a ‘Map’ in gaming lingo. Therefore ‘Mapping’ can be the act of producing a ‘Map’.

What am I designing levels for?

The majority of my level design has been for multi-player deathmatch, a specific type of gameplay.  Deathmatch or ‘DM’ can be loosely defined as a game mode wherein the players are engaged in combat with one or more opponents. Designing maps for on-line play imposes a set of common restrictions on design:

• Maps must have a small file size. For the same reasons as web-design,  if a map is too big, and a player is downloading it from a server,  the player will not wait, they will find some other server.
• Maps must play smoothly. If a map runs poorly on reasonable hardware for the engine, then players cannot be competitive online. In terms of matches played in a day, terrible looking maps will win because they play smoothly. This is why there is a fine balance between good looks and economy in design.
• Maps must have good gameplay. The placement of items, the AI paths for the computer-controlled players, corridors that lead somewhere — and not dead-ends, etc.

To conform to these limitations, I will often design levels with content already shipped with the game, using minimal custom content; but still using custom content where necessary

What skills are required for Level Design?

A level designer must be able to master:

• 3D art – modeling, texturing (3d studio Max, Maya, etc.)
• 2D art – creating world environment textures (photoshop, illustrator)
• sound – audio engineering for environment sounds or musical cues.
• Game-Play elements: paths for AI, and entities, moveable objects, etc.
• Level Optimization – Making sure the level runs efficiently, while looking good.
• Level Editor – Knowledge of the special editor(s) for each engine. These are like CAD (Computer-Aided Design) programs for building the level’s basic geometry.

A level designer may not always create these assets alone, but it is essential to have a basic knowledge of how these assets are created and how they are imported into the game engine. Level designers often have the first view into what an asset looks like in the game, and if they look correct. Then if corrections need to be made to assets, the level designers should be able to communicate to the artists what needs to be done.

A Deathmatch (DM) level designer, more often than not, is a team of one, and develops a lot of the game content by themselves; unless, in a professional game setting, where the art direction is very tight, this may not be the case.  The majority of my levels’ assets were either shipped with the game or created by me; this conserves file size, render speed, etc. and thus and improves the chance of becoming popular with end users.  The level designer can gauge popularity because modern servers can track how many times a level is played over a period of time.

How is game play a factor?

Game play elements of level design include AI bot-pathing, which is putting entities around the level where the computer players can know where items, power-ups and other important game elements can be found.  Also, the levels must be divided into specific zones, rooms must be labeled, etc. so the levels can be adapted to other game-play modes. Additionally, creating levels that have discrete rooms with limited lines of sight  to other rooms help make the map render faster overall.

In Conclusion

I hope this brief overview of the intricacies of level design has provided you with a look in to the reasons why level design is not only an art form but a highly technical and specialized field with its own set of professional accomplishments and skills.  Only the most pragmatic designers can be successful in this field.