FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Level Design Process
Now that you have learned the general principles of level design, let's turn to the process. Level design takes place during the elaboration stage of game design and,
like the overall game design, is an iterative process. At points during the procedure, the level designers should show the work-in-progress to other members of the team for analysis and commentary. Early input from artists, programmers, and other designers prevents you from wasting time on overly complex levels, asking for features the programmers cannot implement, or making demands for artwork that the artists don't have time to meet.
At the 2004 Computer Game Technology Conference in Toronto, Canada, level designers Rick Knowles and Joseph Ganetakos of Pseudo Interactive presented an excellent lecture simply entitled "Level Design" (Knowles and Ganetakos, 2004). They described the 11-stage process by which their company builds levels, which is summarized here. The following sections assume that the development teams consist of game designers, artists, programmers, and sound designers, as well as you: the level designer.
Throughout the discussion of this process, you will notice a strong emphasis on the relationship between the level designer and the art team, and less emphasis on the relationship between the level designer and the audio or programming teams. The reason for this is that level designers build prototype artwork that the art team then uses as a blueprint from which to build final artwork that will actually go into the game. This requires that the level designers hand off their prototype to the art team and receive the final artwork back from the art team at particular stages in the process. The relationship with the programmers and the audio team is less sharply defined. Level designers request special features from these groups, and the project manager determines when and how that work gets done, but generally it doesn't involve handing off material to the audio or programming teams and receiving material back from them in the same way. Your relationship with the programmers and audio people is just as important as your relationship with the artists, but your interactions with them may be less formally scheduled.
