FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

A Note on Duties and Terminology

The nature of a level designer's job varies considerably depending on both the genre of the game and the technology that implements it. A few years ago, level designers were not expected to possess either art or programming skills. As the size and complexity of games has increased, so has the size and complexity of the level designer's job. In modern 3D games, level designers often use 3D modeling tools to construct temporary—and sometimes even final—artwork to go into a game. (The term model refers to a three-dimensional geometric structure that depicts a single thing, such as a human, vehicle, tree, or the underlying landscape of a level.) Also, games now often include scripting engines that allow level designers to write small programs, or scripts, that control some aspects of the behavior of the level during play. Scripting engines normally implement scripting languages less powerful than the programming language used by the programmers, but the scripting language will be sufficient for defining the behavior of automated traps, doors, and other special events that may occur in the level. There isn't room in this book to teach
you the skills you need to use such tools, but you can find many resources for learning to use them on the Internet and at colleges and universities.

For simplicity's sake, this section assumes that you are creating levels for a game that uses a 3D graphics engine to display a 3D game world. If you are making a 2D game, where it refers to models, think in terms of their 2D equivalents: sprites (2D art and animation) for movable objects and the background (a 2D painting, often made up of interchangeable rectangular tiles) for the landscape.