The science and art of level design

We examine the evolution and influence of level editors…

Anyone who has been a gamer over the past decade or so will have noticed that many games shout about an additional creative feature: the level editor.

These allow us, the players, to produce maps for our favourite games, and to feel like we’re giving something back to the gaming community when we share them online.

These tools are, of course, rooted in the actual tools that game development studios use to make the games in the first place, and it’s the significance of that toolset, for both commercial and hobbyist purposes, that we’ll be examining.

Way back at the time of Doom lots of us picked up the editor and began to work out how to turn these line-models into playable levels. It was fiddly stuff, and not exactly the most obvious process. Reading tutorials was a must.

Nowadays, however, things are a little shinier, and seemingly a little more straightforward. As the tech has developed, so the design process has moved onward, giving us new stuff to play with at home. Powerful editing suites for games such as Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis give us far more instant gratification and flexibility than ever before, and yet the flipside of that is complexity.