Talk submissions for GDC's Level Designer's Workshop are open!

[Claire Hosking]

If you're interested in presenting at the Level Designer's Workshop at GDC 2017, you can submit a topic here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUT34dT9HNxVTAxK9IZhUQposGqJenuT9DTxZxPb77xzl_2w/viewform?c=0&w=1

This was really good, I did it last year, and while it was a lot of work to write a 25 minute talk, I'm glad I did!

The organisers very much want to encourage a broad range of talks that cover the diversity of what's happening in game design. You can approach the topic in many different ways (tho "what I learned from designing these levels for this/these games/s" is tried and true).

I'm mentoring this year so you might even have my seasoned wisdom to help guide you through the process

Ps If you know any other forums where this might be good to post (other dev or modding communities perhaps?) please pass it along!

[Dinosaursssssss]

I feel like level design is increasingly becoming a lost art...recently we were trying to hire a LD and couldn't really find anyone around with experience. Obviously this is totally anecdotal but it feels like the AAA industry is shrinking and procedural generation is getting bigger, which makes finding dedicated level designers surprisingly rare.

[itsamoose]

I feel like level design is increasingly becoming a lost art...recently we were trying to hire a LD and couldn't really find anyone around with experience. Obviously this is totally anecdotal but it feels like the AAA industry is shrinking and procedural generation is getting bigger, which makes finding dedicated level designers surprisingly rare.

 

From my (limited) experience I think this is due to the AAA industry moving away from level based games to more systems or experience based games.  Level design is still a big topic in deathmatch and similar multiplayer games, but most AAA games have become so much larger and designers need to have more distinct roles.  A AAA game 10-15 years ago might have had say 1 designer per level and another designer or two to handle the gameplay systems, but nowadays those systems have become so much more complex and require a lot more design resources.  Also in that same regard, level designers are often now responsible for things like cutscenes, story beats, and all kinds of other in-level things that weren't present before, so in a lot of cases the art department ends up taking on some of the responsibility for the actual level layout.