The level designer role

- [Voiceover] A level designer creates the levels, puzzles and environments of the game. No other facet of game development has seen this much change in the past decade as level design and the level designer has been at the center of those changes. Games have quickly progressed from simple arcade based platformers to simulated 3D environments to fully interactive worlds, all within a very short time frame. Consider that today, massively multi player game settings are designed around complex, artistic themes that carry through the entire playable environments, which could be extremely large in scope.

A level designer today is the equivalent of a film cinematographer, director and set designer, all wrapped into a single person. At this point you may be thinking that sounds similar to what a game designer does. In fact, sometimes the two roles are combined on smaller teams. While on larger teams the two roles maybe split up between different people. In most cases level designers will work in the game engine to create the game settings and playable environments. Some game types may not require an engine, so the level designers will build the environments and setting in other software which the game assets will be imported in to.