Great New Book!

To say that The Hows and Whys of Level Design is a great book would be an understatement. In fact, it is in a class all it's own -- in my opinion. Written by Sjoerd "Hourences" De Jong, a veteran to the game industry as a level designer, the book covers all of the fundamentals of what makes a good level: spanning from basic color theory and the color temperature of lights to the psychology of what makes a fun map. While reading the book I had a lot of inspiration to apply the said techniques to my own work. Perhaps the best feature of the book is that it accommodates to the more artistic side of level design. I know that gap between level design and environment art is widening, but I feel that a level designer without an artistic background is limited in the emotional and creative side of designing gameplay experiences. I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in the art of level design!

Here is a link to Hourence's community site and book purchase:
http://help.hourences.com/bookabout.htm

3DBuzz Contest Top 10!

The hard work going into the DM level for the 3Dbuzz Old School Level Design Contest paid off. I was able to make it into the top ten out of 70 entries. Here is the link to the top ten: 3DBuzz Old School Level Design Contest Top Ten Finalists. The contestants were further narrowed down to five, and unfortunately I didn't make the cut. There was some good competition, though, and it was a great learning experience overall. Now that I have completed my first real Level, I am anxious to do more work and keep improving my craft. Right now I'm working on bot AI for a mod that I'm a part of. It doesn't have a name, but it involves traveling up a tall skyscraper and will be single player. Since Unreal doesn't have single player, I am having to find ways of making AI intelligent enough to not go running around and shooting the player all the time.

The completed level that I created for the competition is named DM-Ebb and it can be downloaded from my site under the portfolio>downloads section. Here is the direct link:

DM-Ebb.zip



I am trying to get as much feedback as I can about it to improve my future levels. I will also be working on static meshes and textures for the mod. Until next time!