GDC 2011 Level Design in a Day. Summary & Introduction: Coray Seifert, Senior Game Designer, Arkadium

Editor's Notes

• #3: Welcome to Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business! This is the only tutorial of its kind. The only place you can see a cadre of level design veterans spend an entire day waxing poetic on one of the most essential, most misunderstood, and most tragically underrepresented crafts in the field of game development.As some of you may know, this is the second year this tutorial has appeared at GDC…
• #4: In 2010, this rag tag group of vigilante designers took GDC by storm,
• #5: …packing a conference room to the point of people standing or sitting on the floor for all 8 hours of the tutorial, taking The Marriot Marquis bar by storm afterwards and shocking our benevolent GDC overlords into putting it back on the docket for this year! Can we get a hell yeah for our benevolent GDC overlords?
• #6: So, all in all, it was a pretty good session. But, we never realized exactly how good it was until we looked back on it this year!Check this out…we gave Level Design in a Day 1 in March 2010. May 20 - Scientists Announce that they have created the first functional synthetic genome November 17 – Researchers at CERN trap 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second, marking the first time in history that humans have trappedantimatter.[63]Kind of cheating, since they just ripped off the plot of Plot of Angels and Demons First ever music grammy - DecemberDuke nukem - SeptemberCoincidence? Perhaps. But regardless, we knew we had to outdo ourselves this year in order to climb back to the top of the proverbial GDC mountain, and plant our proverbial flag and be proverbially immortalized in proverb.How could we outdo ourselves? Well, as an on and off writer, I reached into my trusty bag of cliched crap that we all have to resort to when things get rough
• #7: Introduce a debonair turtleneck bedecked super villain?
• #8: Kill off a lovable but tragically flawed character?
• #9: New plucky sidekick?
• #10: Introduce Time Travel? Didn’t want to have to support content for shards
• #11: Will They/Won’t They Romance?
• #12: Or we could just go Oprah and hide an xboxkinect under everyone’s seat. j/k.Conclusion: just put together a whole new day of level design lectures; completely different from last year; and next year will be completely different from this year.So, let’s check out our agenda for today!
• #13: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #14: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #15: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #16: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #17: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #19: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #22: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #23: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #24: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #25: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #26: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #27: 10:00 – Introductions10:15 – Ed Byrne: "Bad" Level Design11:00 – Break11:15 – Forrest “Foster” Dowling: Encounter Building12:30 – Lunch & Q&A 2:00 – Forrest Dowling and the Level Devils Panel Discussion 3:00 – Joel Burgess: LD Wisdom applied to Open World 4:00 – Break 4:15 – Neil Alfonso: Level Design as a Game Design Conduit 5:15 – Jim Brown: What it means to be an LD 6:00 – After Party of Knowledge: Bin 55 @ The Marriot Marquis
• #30: Who are you people?Students?Teachers/Professors?Testers?Programmers?Producers?Writers?Game Designers?Level Designers?
• #31: Who do you work for?Big Scary Publishers?Big Scary Media Companies?Indies?Unemployed?
• #32: How long have you been in the industry?Just getting started?At least 1 year?At least 2 years?At least 5 years?At least 10 years?At least 15 years?For reals? Dizzamn?
• #33: How long did it take you to get here?Under 2 hours travel to GDC?At least 4 hours travel to GDC?At least 6 hours travel to GDC?At least 10 hours travel to GDC?At least [wtf] hours travel to GDC?
• #34: Update this linkFill out your comment cardsWe want this tutorial to make your trip – so much content you could go home stuffed full of knowledge and beer. If you think we did that, give us a 5.0! These guys worked hard and they deserve it. If you’re experience was anything short of that, let us know in the comments. We’ll be back next year, all of our content will be 100% new and exciting, and will largely be driven by the comments that you guys leave on these cards, so please take a moment and ask us what you’d like to hear about!