A career as A Level Designer

Welcome to the community, Matthew!

It looks like you have a choice to make as you come to the end of your course.

A) Apply for UCAS/CAO and get into university/college. This is the logical next step as you need a solid academic background for a long career in any technology-based industry. There are many jobs that require you have a degree, but more than just a piece of paper, uni wil probably be the greatest time of your time and you’ll really grow from it! Have a look at different courses and see if anything interests you. Decide whether you want to go down the academic or vocational route. ie; traditional courses versus games courses. Throughout your time at uni you could work on mod projects to build up experience.

B) Try to get an industry job. This could be a lot faster in the short-term, but may harm you in the long-term. You may have difficulty getting a job if you have little or no experience. One way that a lot of people get in is through testing. It’s not my cup of tea to ‘prove’ my determination this way, but it is a way. This would give you a valuable insight into the company and put you in a good positon to move up into level design after a couple of years.

Are you sure having a career as a level designer would satisfy you? While there are many people content with staying in one position for their whole lives, most will crave variation and want to ‘move up in the world’. You shouldn’t see level design as an end in itself but one step along your journey. You could spread your wings later on by going into game design or production. You’d have to ask a level designer, but I don’t think maybe will want to be doing it as they approach retirement.

Good luck, Matthew.

shur in my course were UT04 and its excellent i have torque nut dont know how to use it but i will soon

Put some time into creating some great levels. Try perfect them and get the online community interested in them.
Also, spend some time getting familiar with scripting, invaluable for the level designer.

You seem to be doing all the right things. Keep making levels in UT, learn some Maya or 3DSMax and apply for some jobs when you finish school.

Try Dark Water in Derry for starters…

As omen says, try scripting but its not essential to being a level designer (alot of places ask for some knowledge though…try doing simple loops in LUA or some other scripting language). At the end of of the day you can always get a coder like omen to do the scripting for your level :p

UT is almost the standard level design tool for submitting portfolio work nowadays…other level editors are accepted tooooooo

If you can do 2D sketches of some levels then build them that will show that you area able to pre-visualise the levels

But yeah…..learn a bit of Maya though (NB; I’m heavily biased to Maya).

-Ivan…occasional level design person.

At the end of of the day you can always get a coder like omen to do the scripting for your level :p [/quote:43947cf7bb]
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Oh alright then…

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/341/ask_the_experts_in_the_.php
-An architecture student asks about becoming a level designer.

Maya has a free Personal Learning Edition and Max has a 30 day trial

http://www.autodesk.com

Only had a quick look through this before so not sure how good it is but it seems to be popular enough and Discrete ‘based’ on 3ds max…
http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax

I didnt realise you could still get Gmax.
The problem with it is it only exports to game engine formats and the company that makes the game has to buy a license to make an exporter.
It isnt supported anymore so no new exporters.

I didnt realise you could still get Gmax.[/quote:f81412f01a]
Autodesk discontinued it last year and no longer offer support for it, but it’s still available for download.

Gmax is horrible. Even though I prefer 3D Studio Max over Maya, go for the Maya PLE.

Is there a version of Maya that you can get free that doesn’t cover all your renders in watermarks??

Is there a version of Maya that you can get free that doesn’t cover all your renders in watermarks??[/quote:a872ac8207]

Don’t be silly :wink: How would they make money? You could get student versions of the software which is quite cheap. Speak to people in your college for details.

Is there a version of Maya that you can get free that doesn’t cover all your renders in watermarks??[/quote:c9c68b52dc]
Perhaps an idea would be to create all the models at home in your own time. Then if you have access to a full version at university or a friend’s workplace, go in there and render out your images.

Either that or work on your portfolio all year and then get the 30 day trail and render out all your work.

(I’ve heard there is a plugin that removes the watermark, but that has no place here!)

Okay, its not for me, its for my missus.
She’s graduated and currently still working on her portfolio. The version I have at home start acting up so she can’t use it anymore. She’s gone back to using Max because Maya is gay. The 30 day trial one is the one with the watermarks so thats useless. Doing your work on a version that does watermarks is rubbish too, because you can’t ee stuff because of the watermarks. I thought Maya/Max were easily accessible due to the fact you could use them easily and get easy access, but when you want to publish anything for money, you need a license…