How to get a job as a game level designer
Alex Calvin
Tuesday 31st May 2022
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Level design is one of the key disciplines within game development.
The people who work in this speciality create the world that players explore when spending time within a game. They have to create a playground that is understandable to navigate and that shows off a game's core mechanics, while also making the player feel a certain way.
But it's also a field that varies hugely from studio to studio.
"A common through-line however is [that] a level designer will take the tools, code, art, game systems, story, given to them by the rest of the team and begin the process of turning all of that into an actual game," Arkane Lyon campaign director Dana Nightingale tells the GamesIndustry.biz Academy.
"The player is given tools; how and where can they use them? Characters with AI have been created; what spaces do they inhabit and how can they interact with those spaces? Narrative content is developed; is it integrated into the gameplay space, and if so, how? A level designer's work can be any of these things, and often much more."
Level design is an important field, but one that has a number of different entry points. You can access it via more traditional academic routes, as well as hobbyist ones, making it -- theoretically -- a more accessible sector than more technically-minded areas of game design.
Arkane's Deathloop
There are many routes into scoring a job as a level designer. Many of the people we spoke to argue you don't even need a degree specific to this craft, but other
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