Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

A P P E N D I X D
MAPPING OR LEVEL BUILDING
Whether you’re working as a level designer building levels or maps, or working as a
game designer on overall game detailing, you will be using a variety of software tools
to build in functionality. The only way to get really familiar with building up game
play using tools is to do it repeatedly—to go through the labors of build, test, refine,
build, test, refine, ad nauseum. There are more tools available to players and developers
than ever before. This is great for access, bad for mastery.
I don’t know which tool you are using, want to use, or will be using. Yes, we
want powerful game development tools, powerful editors with amazing flexibility,
but ultimately part of the true power is in what you bring to the tool—your own
gaming insights developed over countless thousands of hours of play.
As a general piece of advice, try to know one FPS editing tool, one RTS/RPGoriented
tool, along with one 3-D package. This helps you to cover your bases and create
opportunities for yourself.
A UDIO
Depending on team configuration, your game team might be working with an audio
director via your producer. As designers and producers, we want to make sure to
maximize audio impact at every turn. It’s simply unacceptable to ignore audio detailing.
It’s best to know how to edit basic sounds and create placeholder sounds and effects.
Sometimes you might even come up with something useable! Take advantage of the
excellent tools available from Sonic Foundry (www.sonicfoundry.com).
Plan for audio early on. Push it closer to center stage in your design concerns. It’s
easy to get lost in nothing but the visuals, but that is a mistake! Audio will do wonders
in helping you transfer mood and emotion.
T ESTING
You’ll be testing right along with QA. You’ll try to make fixes before they become
official bugs. You may not like the feedback coming from QA. Listen carefully—
frustration is usually shared. If players are having a bad experience with your game,
you’ll need to do some real-time problem solving to try to address the situation. It
will create more work. This is the cost of refinement; the alternative is failing to get
your game where it needs to be in order to succeed. Make sure that testing continues
among your peers as well.
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Quick Topic Summary for Designers