Interview: Ed Byrne (Level Designer)

[requiem2d]

Interview with Ed Byrne

Today we have a chance to interview Ed Byrne, who with 6 years of industry experience is definitely a veteran of level design. He has worked on various games including Splinter Cell, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs - Fireteam Bravo and three Harry Potter titles.

During his career, he has written a great book on level design which is also why I initially approached him. His book, entitled Game Level Design can be found here. Although Ed provides us with some excellent tips & insights during the course of this interview, his book will really shed light on the workflow of level design in a professional environment.

Hope you all enjoy this interview as much as the staff here at Game-Artist.net did, enjoy....

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Game-Artist.net - Hi Ed, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to participate in this interview. In your Amazon plog, you've stated that Level Designers are a hot commodity in the game industry nowadays which would mean you are quite busy! Could you please tell us what you've been up to recently either professionally or in your free time?

Ed Byrne - Well, my current project, SOCOM: U.S Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 2, is deep in production, so that's pretty much been the focus between occaisionally sleeping and playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion when I can. Unfortunately, I've not been able to do much level design recently beyond initial paper concepting and whiteboxing - as a lead designer I don't get to implement much, but the flipside is that I get to see the design team work wonders with the levels, which is much more satisfying these days.

Personally, I just purchased the Torque 2D engine and have been having fun playing around with that. It's really easy to make quick scrollers and 2D PC games. I asked my five year old son to design a game we could build using Torque and so if all goes well I should be starting work on "Rescue Guy 1", a side-scrolling platformer about a guy with a jepack who rescues animals from evil robots, later this year

Game-Artist.net - Mapping tools often come packaged with a game these days and many casual gamers give applications such as UnrealED & Hammer a try for fun, most of which give up shortly after due to frustration. However you always have a few which find a new opportunity in it and have an incredible passion & drive to really make it. What three tips would you recommend to such an amateur mapper who just found out this is what he/she wants to do for life? As in, what three tips will they benefit from the most if they now want to make the best out of their time invested in level design?

Ed Byrne - I've found that level designers come from all walks of life, truly - architects, animators, history scholars, engineers or even marine biologists. In many cases the common factor is that they all happened to load up an editor for their favourite game and - BAM! - they got hit by the level design bug, and never turned back. The ability to actually create a world and exist in it - or see others exist in it - is a pretty powerful feeling. For those that want to take it all the way to a career in games, I'd offer the following three tips:

1.) Learn to plan, to sit and think before you start building. Amateur level design can be spur-of-the-moment design and shooting from the hip modeling. You don't answer to anyone but your own internal critique. However as a pro level designer you are a paid member of a team, and one of the best ways to make sure you use your time, and budget, well is to learn how to properly plan and prototype a gamespace properly before actually executing the design. This means learning to sketch your ideas in rough, learning to think your level through completely, from start to finish. It also means learning how to rough out your design as a white box so you can play it in 3D, and realise what doesn't work that seemed great on paper. Lastly you need to learn to plan for presentation - pitching your level design to your teammates, your leads, or even your publisher. There are a lot of great level designers out there but the most valuable are those that can iterate and refine their designs before they even open the editor, ensuring a smooth build process and a solid gameplay experience.

2.) Learn not only to take criticism, but to seek it. A lot of self-taught level designers are talented but can become depressed or defensive when they receive negative feedback or suggestions about their work. I was lucky in that I went to college for an art degree, where my work was routinely lambasted by my professors in front of the whole class, so I learned this the hard way. The benefit of this was the realisation that no designer is an island - you need feedback from your peers to get the "big picture" about your work and identify elements that don't fit with the larger context of the level. Learn to embrace feedback, and love to cut - cutting is a great way of trimming your level back to it's most potent form. A level designer who takes measured criticism and can readily work it into positive action is a valuable member of any design department. If you're an amateur level designer, try to get your work out onto the Internet for as much feedback as you can, ask friends and colleagues for their opinions and try updating your maps based on the responses you get..

3.) Finish a level. This may sound obvious, but a terrible curse of "hobby" level design is you often end up with a hard drive full of half-finished maps for a half-dozen games. When there's no pressure on you to finish a level, it's hard to move beyond the stage where your initial enthusiasm for the map has worn off and you realise it's going to take weeks or months of tweaking and tuning to actually finish the level. A lot of amateur level designers will move onto a new, different map idea at this point. Unfortunately, this is a bad habit for a level designers trying to build a portfolio - one solid, awesome level is much better than a handful of neat but half-finished levels in your portfolio when interviewing. That's why I always urge amateur mappers to really concentrate on one or two simple levels that demonstrate their ability to make a good-looking and well-thought-out space in a timely fashion, from start to finish.

Joining a mod group is a great way to get the kind of external pressure you need to get you over the hump and finish off a complete level, as well as provide you with a private audience for critical analysis.

Game-Artist.net - Irrelevant of time & resources required, is there more of a challenge designing levels for handheld devices where you always have to be crunching poly's & sacrificing detail or rather for PC games where consumers expect life-like environments?

Ed Byrne - I think for pure challenge, designing levels for a handheld is a little more strenuous, as you need to really be careful to use every ounce of resources in order to balance eye-candy with gameplay content. It's even more challenging these days with handhelds like the PSP where the levels can almost look and play as beautifully as a PS2, and players expect a more console-like experience in their handheld. Creating real-life environments on a PC is of course still a very lofty goal, but with a PC developer who is catering to the high-end hardware bracket, its more a matter of time and effort to create beautiful environments, rather than squeezing out every last drop from the GPU of a portable device.

That's high-level challenge. There are other challenges implicit in creating levels for portable vs. PC. The biggest that I've found so far is that players who buy games for portable devices expect a much higher level of "replayability". Levels for handheld games also need to support "packet gaming" where the player is only able to play for short periods of time - like riding on the bus to work - so levels have to have enough density of gameplay and frequency of reward to make it worth the player jumping in for short bursts of gaming. This often means that levels need to support multiple game modes, as well as replay value and balancing for short vs. extended play.

Finally, the reality of PC vs. portable technology is that handheld levels need to be built frugally. With only a small amount of memory, even for the latest generation of handhelds, level designers need to be smart in reusing assets, where PC levels can often have larger textures sizes, more unique models and assets, and so on thanks to large average memory sizes and storage devices.

Having done both, I like the challenges in handheld development more, as it can often force you to think much more critically about your levels earlier in the production process.

Game-Artist.net - Do you feel that level design in general should make more use of vertical space as opposed to restricting themselves to "flatter" looking levels? It has been exciting to see it used in games where you wouldn't expect it, such as the Uphill Race on Gran Turismo. However, what about all the other games who more then often give little attention to vertical space?

Ed Byrne - Vertical space is great because it evokes very visceral reactions form players, and can convey movement and depth in way that is hard to represent on the horizontal plane. It used to be the standard for platformers, with games like Doom and later to a much greater extent, Duke Nukem 3D taking the idea of vertical gameplay into the FPS fold and using it for multiplayer flow. Looking at it from a development angle, there are a lot of hurdles to having a lot of vertical elements. Obviously, camera location and game controls have always been huge factors as has genre (RPGs and strategy titles have featured less than platformers and modern FPS titles) and the supportiveness of each game's central theme.

Regardless, the rise in poly budgets (and the evolution of level design) has seen even traditionally "flat" games like dungeon crawler RPGs embrace more organic level designs with thought given to vertical navigation. I think that its up to the individual designer to have verticality in his or her toolbox, and use where appropriate. A designer can almost always use vertical elements to increase or make subtle certain aspects of a level. For instance, in shooters, high ledges and steep climbs can really increase the tension of a combat encounter, requiring that the player be aware of his location at all time to avoid falling. Likewise, moving down deeper into a level with high walls looming over you can create create fear, while emerging onto a high bluff overlooking an ocean vista can create that "wow" moment every level needs. Far Cry does this well, in all of these areas..

Valve has shown both the good and the bad extremes of vertical elements in the original Half Life. While one of the best Half Life levels to my mind was the cliff side encounter where the player has to descend down the side of a mesa by a series of razor thin switchbacks, the last few levels of Half Life were a case where the verticality simply wet beyond the game's ability to support it and put a lot of players off.

Game-Artist.net - We'd like to compare two levels from a modification and a retail game. The modification, Insurgency, planning to release for Half Life 2 has created the levels which you see on the left (Location: Middle East). The levels on the right are from the retail game Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter aka GRAW (Location: South America). Now to us, both real life locations offer a variety of colors, architecture and distinct features which the mod Insurgency has caputred very well but somehow GRAW lacks. GRAW immerses a player with 3D effects such as sun-glare, bloom and advanced particle effects, yet Insurgency through it's accurate representation of it's real life counterpart location seems to immerse the player much more? Could you possibly shed light on why, for two Military FPS games the styles of level differ so much and why one would think the mod actually looks better then the retail game?

Ed Byrne - Having been to neither of the places in question in real life, it's hard for me to validate their visual authenticity, but certainly there is a difference in terms of where the two teams have focused their energy. In the end both games are visually compelling but their routes to completion are what sets the creative road map to completion. That's a big difference between mod development and commercial game development. Commercial games have access to heavyweight talent, experience and technology advantages, but with mods have the chance to come out on top when organised well, through longer development times and a creative mandate without the need to generate sales. Commercial titles are always on a deadline, and always working against a budget that burns every day the team works on the title. In the end, most commercially produced games suffer at the hands of expediency, with recycling of resources and a tight focus on key aspects of level design - be it immersiveness, emergence, visual punch or scale - to sell the game. This is why you'll often have a visually impressive looking title that breaks down over time as the player begins to see the overuse of a certain visual effect, assets used repeatedly or variable attention to detail during play.

Contrast this against a mod group with generally no deadlines save those set democratically amongst the team, and where level designers are responsible in general for only a few levels. In this situation, designers and artists are often much more free to pursue their own visions for each level, without commercial constraints, and can afford a lot more time for iteration and tuning to nail that "look and feel" that can be lost in the schedules of professional game development. Hence, some mods are as good looking, or as fun to play, as contemporary shelf titles.






Game-Artist.net - Every year games look better and resources needed to create them become larger, what significant changes to level design do you envision 10 years from now?

Ed Byrne - Super-specialisation is one big difference I think we're seeing emerge now, and will continue to see rapidly increase over the next decade. With the kind of scale games will demand, both in large environments and depth of detail, there is going to need to be a lot more focus on individual talent and professionalism on a more granular level. This isn't to say "jack of all trades" level designers will not exist, but just like film, we'll start to see the creation of positions like "terrain detailer" or "continuity designer" that reflect a level of standardisation and acceptance as a legitimate craft that we game developers will need to survive.

10 years from now - god, how long will it take to just build a simple house? The pessimist in me suggests we might see huge teams of designers, artists and scripters all choreographed by a large management team to complete large subdivisions for later assembly. That's the formula for large publishers right now. But more likely is that we'll see reasonably sized teams of experts using very sophisticated technology that makes creating content much easier than it is now. Consider the editors and modeling packages we have presently as the hand-cranked cameras and rudimentary film stock of Hollywood in the thirties - I can't imagine what kind of cool tech our successors will get their mitts on in a decade.


Game-Artist.net - On a lighter note, what is the most original easter egg you've ever seen in a map?

Ed Byrne - I still love the hidden basketball court in Thief - one of my favourite games, and definitely one of the most original non-sequitar easter eggs in a game. Duke Nukem had some of the most original (and prolific) easter eggs in a game I think though - from the Indiana Jones cave to the microphone where Duke would sing "Born to be Wild" when activated - I was always on the look-out for hidden content in that game, and rarely disappointed. I'd give my vote to 3D Realms for that one

Game-Artist.net - Any last words for aspiring level designers reading this interview?

Ed Byrne - Keep EVERYTHING you ever create. Use good quality notebooks and sketch pads to archive all your crazy ideas. Something you come up with for a level that gets cut now will be EXACTLY what you need five years down the road when you're stumped about how to fix some element in one of your designs. No idea is worthless, it just may not be appropriate for your project at the time. It may sound obvious, and your girl/boyfriend will yell at you about all your crazy notebooks cluttering up the living room, but ignore them. Every level design concept has its day

Beyond that – for those amateur designers seeking employment, stay positive. There's a huge demand for level designers right now, unprecedented I think due to the console war looming on the near horizon and the manpower needed to make next-gen titles. Keep sending out resumes, keep building your portfolio and keep reading the job postings and you'll find opportunities opening up.

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Game-Artist.net - Ed, thank you so much for your time and insight! I hope everybody will take as much from this interview as I did!


Game Level Design by Ed Byrne
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Ed Byrne, profile @ MobyGames: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/s...eloperId,73421
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter: http://www.ghostrecon.com/
Insurgency: http://www.insurgencymod.net/

[doylle]

Very cool. Interesting read! Thank you Ed

[bart013]

interesting article,love the games witch he designed levels for(socom espacialy)

[requiem2d]

Yeah, lot of great tips he gives out, kind of surprised that not more people have commented, but then we're also not all level designers

[Kibble]

Great article.

Gives me hope to know there is a requirement for this kind of thing. I'm going to be on the job search in a couple of weeks now, so this is good news for an aspiring level designer.

--Kibb

[Pankake]

Sweet! That book looks interesting, might haveto pick up a copy.

[Xadeko]

same here, that book looks very interesting,

[Squirrelly]

It's nice to see that people view our work (Insurgency) as such high quality that it can be compared to a retail game. It really motivates us to even further our attempts at creating a wonderful game. Thank you! Just for your information, the two maps depicted (ins_baghdad and ins_almaden) were created by Matthias "Steppenwolf" Schmidt and Joey "Erratic" Adey.

[NormySan]

Nice interview, a good read. I will definatley have to get the book further down the road!

And imo, the Insurgency style of graphics is much better than Graw.

[requiem2d]

Happy you guys liked it, took me a while to get all the questions nailed down ! Agreed on the Insurgency visuals, I forgot that Ed had worked for Ubisoft too which may or may not have influenced his neutral words there