level designer – post 255

Little Big Planet seems to be a hot thing right now. Honestly, if I had a PS3 I’d go buy it. A new take on a old school platforming sounds so sweet, but in all honesty this more a packaged level editor then game. Now I haven’t played it. I’ve only seen clips and such online, but it’s so refreshing to such a product come out. Why? Because it’s literally a game teaching tool. Media Molecule are helping the game industry build more game designers with this release. Players get to build levels and share them with everyone. They’ll make first crap levels and then learn though mistakes and trial and error what makes good game design. Challenge and reward, choke points, difficulty curves, they’ll learn it all. All just for the price of a game and a little of their time.

It’s games like this that make me proud to be in this industry. It’s games like this that help promote, thinking, planning and creativity in it’s players. Now I just need to get involved in such a project.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 11:11 pmand is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “level designer – post 255”

  • Sage86 Says:
    November 12th, 2008 at 1:18 am

    I’ll have to agree with you on that. I know many people who want to make game (I’m one of them in the modeling sense) but they don’t know where to start. They think they can pick up a book on c++ and jump right in to it. But they miss the key points. Structure, layout design. These level editors are a great way to plan out a level. You can’t just jump into it. You have to sit down and actually think. Where will the enemies be, what to hide behind, what to hide what to show. How do you intend the level to be played?

    I remember the map editor in AOE 2, simple easy fun. And the “Halo Editing Kit”, ungodly yes but it really teaches you level design since you have to build the map triangle for triangle using 3ds Max. It really gives you more of an appreciation for those who made the game. I wish the developers took more time to issues some kind of level editor with the game. Not only does it help keep the game alive, but it makes the game more fun, and IMO give the devs a good name. This coming from a moderate gamer.

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