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WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO LEARN:
Design compelling, engaging video game levels like a professional. To do this you need game design skills, and if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to build your own levels and present your skills to potential clients / employers.
WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO LEARN:
Design compelling, engaging video game levels like a professional. To do this you need game design skills, and if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to build your own levels and present your skills to potential clients / employers.
Drawing on 30 years of game development, experience in art and game design, and a game design book published by Pearson Education (not included), I will show you how to create your own game ready levels from scratch. You will begin with learning the basics of creating bubble diagrams and sketching on paper to iterate quickly, then onto creating a 3D game environment presented in Unity. You will learn to use pro builder and pro grids to aid in your level creations.
DESIGN / STORY / EMOTION:
Creating levels for games, is at the heart of this course, but it's also about the ideas and the game design process that spawn the levels and worlds in which we play our games. The story you can tell through level design and the emotion your scene can invoke is also key to creating a successful level, and I will show you techniques on how you can deliver that in this course.
Principles like; Design From the Core; Foreshadowing; Exposure; Layering; Immersion; Fight or Flight; Up the Ante; Pacing; Progression; Player Feedback; Situational Awareness; Scalable Rewards; Difficulty Ramping; Enemy Placement; Loot Placement; Player Choice; Colour as a Design tool, and many, many more.
You will learn how to build a level in a 3D environment and install a character controller so you can explore and see your level from the players perspective, and come to realise what an iterative process level design actually is.
This course is perfect for anybody seriously wishing to pursue a career as a Level Designer in the video game industry and would like to follow the process of level design by building an entire white box scene using various design principles and techniques.
It's suitable for beginners to Intermediate levels. The more advanced designers may find that you're going over old ground in some areas, but it can still be a worthy refresher course. Over time, the course will get regular updates and keep on trend with industry techniques and standards.
Level design is a very specific discipline within the games industry, and here we are primarily focusing on highly detailed, level creation process in white box form. I am also not a programmer so there is no prgramming in this course. However, I am going to add an additional section to cover some basic scripting at a later date, as an extra section to this course.
Introduction to The ART of Level Design, for games.
A quick run through of the things you will need for this course (not much and it's all free).
In this lecture, I take you through the the things you will be learning in this course and how it's laid out.
How to get the most from this course.
Join our community.
Introduction
In this lecture I discuss th erole of a Level Designer and what they do as a job.
In this lecture we define the term 'level'.
Here we take a look at the constraints you will encounter when beginning your journey as a level designer.
In this lecture I want to talk about where your level sits in the overall scope of the game.
Here we will break down a level into it's parts, and take a look and what makes up a level.
Conclusion
In this section, we're going to explore the idea, and how to form it into a project.
Here i discuss ways in which to start your level, always a tough challeneg for a designer.
Let's take a look at the design brief. A document to describe the level you will be creating.
A challenge to create your own Design Brief.
A good place to start is to create reference and mood boards.
In the lecture we put down our first marks on paper.
We take a look at a challenge to create your own bubble diagrams.
Conclusion
Design Principles Introduction
We take a look at the first map and what we are looking to achieve from this section.
Follow along challenge that you can do as you watch each video in this section.
Before looking at the principles, I take you through what game beats are to help you pace your design choices.
In this lecture, we take a look at the heart of the idea and let it drive the design.
Here I talk about the design principles Exposure and Priming.
Here I talk about the design principles Layering and Immersion.
Here I talk about the design principles Shaping and Fight or Flight.
Here I talk about the design principle Upping the Ante.
Here I talk about the design principles Pacing and Progression.
Here I talk about the design principle Communication, or Player Feedback as it's also called.
Here I expand on the Communication principle.
Here I talk about the design principles Situational Awareness and Resolution.
Here I talk about scalable Rewards and Difficulty Ramping.
In this lecture we discuss Foreshadowing, a principle used in movies, novels and games.
Here we look at using colour as a design tool.
Here you can refine your map that you've been drawing through this section.
Conclusion.
Here we take a look at a great example of a white box level from the Uncharted series of games (Copyright) Naughty Dog / Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Here I discuss the design principle 'Form Follows Function', a principle that is used in many areas of design.
As we continue to build the scene, I discuss the use of colour and composition as design tools.
In this lecture I explain the basic principals of Modular Design before we begin using it in our level.
Continue to build the scene, where we discuss the use of modular design.
In this lecture we take a look at setting up an event inside the game and put the player under some real pressure.
Introduction to this section
As a Level Designer you could well be asked to add Navmesh to your scene, but what is it?
In this lecture, we add NavMesh to our scene in Unity.
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