Tagged: design

15Jan

Specialisms in Level Design Part 4: Lighting

Posted in Level Design | 1 Comment

Lighting your level is mainly about making sure the level is appropriately lit so that the player can navigate correctly through your level.  It also means ensuring you have placed the correct type of light sources i.e. directional, point, spot or sunlight within the level so that it adds to the atmosphere created in your environment and if necessary supports any mechanics used in the level.

In this post I will briefly describe how lighting can be used within level design.  The brightness and colours of lights used to light your level will all depend on the type of atmosphere you want to create.  Any colours used below are examples and by no means a strict rule of how to light your level.

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01Dec

Specialisms in Level Design Part 2: Visuals

Posted in Level Design | 4 Comments

Visuals and populating levels

Level designers can be required to populate their levels with appropriate and correctly placed static meshes and effects creating beautiful environments that accurately capture the area of your game.  This role for level designers will mean that they will have to work closely with the artist responsible for their level within the game.  They will create the neccessary models ready for the designer to import and use within the game engine’s editor. (more…)

15Aug

Lighting in Level Design: Helping the Player to Navigate

Posted in Game Design, Level Design | 3 Comments

Placing lighting and learning how to correctly light a level when beginning level design may be considered boring to novices, but lighting in levels can be very important.  If used correctly lighting levels in specific ways can be used to aid players when navigating difficult levels and also create interesting gameplay experiences.

Lighting, like colour, can be used to draw the players attention to useful objects or paths to take especially when the light is coloured in certain shades.

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04Jun

Game Design Concepts Lessons now available via PDF!

Posted in Game Design | 3 Comments

Last Summer Ian Schreiber, an experienced video games programmer and designer, held an online game design course. The course proved to be quite popular with over 600 participants taking part in the experimental course.

There is no information available currently regarding whether Schreiber will be conducting another Game Design course during the coming months however, for all those that are interested, the course lessons from last Summer are now available via PDF here for all to download.

27May

Knowing when to quit or stick with your designs

Posted in Productivity | Leave a comment

Have you ever got a point in any project that you are working on whether it be a new game or an assignment where you start to lose faith in the project?

May be it’s not turning out how you expected or wanted it to be and you’re starting to doubt that it was ever a good idea in the first place.  Everyone gets into this state of mind at one point or another.  The trick is to ride through this state if the project is really worth it or to learn know when to quit that project, learn from your mistakes and move on. (more…)