Something has been bugging me for a while now: Level Designers are not very efficient

Isn't this that one guy working on The Fractured But Whole who gets asshurt constantly about having to work on a south park game since it offends him?

when was the last time a level designer actually did the job

BREAKING NEWS: Local Man Wants To Build Machine To Do His Job For Him

Shouldn't the machine get paid instead of him in that situation?

ideally, yes.

What happened in that image anyway? What caused the house to explode?

LET THAT NIGGA CRY

Somebody tried to run Arkham Knight on a laptop

If I had to guess, gas leak.

I remember someone bringing this up a few years ago and I agree. Like so many other things, automation is going to take over in order to save costs. Developers have fucked themselves so hard with graphics that they're reaching a point where no one will have the money to make games at such a high level of detail. Automation would fix that, but at the cost of the same problems we currently have with open world games, while putting a lot of people out of work. It's going to happen, but the only people that will see the benefits are the ones paying employees to make games.

2007
and even that had to be butchered

OP turned on his faggot detector for the first time

or a very localized flame tornado
sounds like a fucking pokemon move

They captured it?

How long until they can harness its power?!

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English isn't my first language and I'm not very good at twitterspeak, somebody translate this to me.
Is he saying that not a lot of people think NMS will be good?
Is he saying that not a lot of people think NMS will be bad?
Is he saying the same, but about A LOT of people?

Machines don't have souls. They are our slaves. We control them. They would never revolt against us. We created them so we can abuse them however we want.

neither do jews, but people still pay them

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He's saying that not many people think NMS will be a console-selling or extremely high-quality game. Which I'd say sounds a lot like trying to rewrite the past, but that's just my opinion.

Whenever I walk like Magnius towards my dog she freaks out and starts barking at me

I'm thinking gas leak, you can see the fire was after the explosion by the way things have burnt.

Of course, he's completely full of shit since we all know NMS is shit and uses procedural generation in the same boring ways it's been used before.

I really have to ask, how do level designers even work anymore? Everything is just either straight lines or large flat open worlds.

WHY CAN'T THEY LEARN, THEY JUST DON'T FUCKING LEARN.

the things that have taken the hardest hit with new game design theories are dialogue options and level design. the fight to make open worlds bigger and bigger hasn't made a damn thing better, 9 times out of ten the world is barren and devoid of things to do and memorable landmarks

mgsV might have fantastic core mechanics but since its levels are half composed of crawling through barren fields those mechanics go to waste, whereas in MGS1-3 every area was much more efficiently thought out

in early 3d GTA games the open worlds were smaller and hid power ups and the like within the world which made for much more exciting car chases because the player didn't have to keep cross referencing their GPS because they started to actually learn the areas much faster

you would think shit shit would be in the fucking game devs handbook, to constantly remember why people can replay stuff like DOOM a million times over and the average AAA game only exists within its release year

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Intentional gas leak to collect insurance money. Killed about 7 people, did millions in damage. The people involved are still going to trial.

as a carpenter,this image has me both wringing my hands, but also screaming eternally at the amount of damage done

I wonder if its what people are taught it school now, or if they just learn from "game design theory" videos from anyonee

what's the next step of its master plan?

Google 'Richmond Hill explosion', it was an intentional gas leak so they could collect insurance money. 2 neighbours died and 7 was injured.

i know one guy that took some game design courses, of course he doesn't work in the field now big surprise, i should ask if they cover any of the stuff that made good games good, or do they just teach people to pump out a product ASAP so marketing can take care of the rest

But user, gaming has matured so much since then that designers have nothing left to learn from musty old classics. Haven't you heard of our groundbreaking research in skatepark combat arenas and gender-sensitive design?
Real answer: designing and testing good levels is hard when artists are constantly covering it in several layers of high-polygon shit.

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Is this the Richmond hill explosion in question?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Hill_explosion

Yep.

Handcrafted levels will always beat randomly generated one. As a programmer I find the algorithms that make those procedurally generated maps kinds fascinating, but as a gamer I don't like it at all. This fag is either bad at his job and complains it's so hard or he just burned out. Probably both

what did he mean by this?

He means that he is lazy and wants to be payed to sit on his ass doing nothing. He's not a nigger, so it's not gonna happen.

That's a big fire…

lol

Interesting hand crafted levels > randomly generated vomit.
Prove me wrong.

It's sad enough that quake and doom1/2 campaign maps were good enough to play as deathmath maps in multiplayer

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look at what UT4 does, they release the map as empty untextured sketch of a map, so they can tweak and play around it and when it's considered good enough only then they turn it into a good looking stuff

die in a hole dragon
but i want good games and cancer, so
"get well soon dragon"

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Doesn't Half Life have a go-
Oh.
nevermind user. I said nothing.

get well soon dragon

Why do you want cancer user?

No Man's Sky will be looked on, a few years from now, as a paradigm shift. As procedural generation gets better and better, I expect level designers to be phased out, or have greatly reduced/changed job duties when it comes to game design.

Imagine if Rockstar had a procedural generator for cities. One that auto populates a city with buildings. They could of course go in after the fact and refine the look, but I can see something like this over the horizon. If not with them, definitely with a smaller dev wanting a chunk of that sandbox pie.

I can't wait until gameplay systems are procedural generated.

We'll eventually have entire games made by AI/robots.

Get Well Soon Dragon

Remember the marketing and glorified "director" leads standing over their shoulder constantly telling them to "make it more cinematic".

They tried running Crysis on max settings

if you look at Oblige project (oblige.sourceforge.net/), we're already able to "automate" the process of generating playable maps

the problem is, for "real" games we need an easy to use map editing tools - something like Portal 2 editor but more sophiscated and with more possibilities. in Doom you only have to put squares here and there and you have a map. in a real 3d game though that level would look completely barren, so they need to find a way to make easy to generate believable 3d scenery.

something like taking a 2d tile system used in many platform games and make those tiles 3d, representing many different construction parts that can nicely embeed with each other

get well soon dragon

a fetish of mine, really.
I get off to cancer.

No surprise at all here. Level design is one of the worst aspects of modern gaming. They say actions speak louder than words, and the designs these people come up with essentially say, "I hate my job and am here to do the absolute bare-minimum required of me." Not surprised at all to see they would rather have a computer do their jobs for them (they would probably do a better job since you can't get much worse than what we have now).

It would be kinda interesting to see something like a squad FPS generated by AI, complete with randomized character designs, weapons, powers, and maps.

Well, there's Due Process, which is basically Rainbow Six: Siege with randomly generated maps.

Surely nobody actually thinks this-
Ooooooooh.

For everyone who says level design is nothing to care about, think back to your first warp pipe or the first secret wall in Doom. The reason these things stick with you is precisely because they were not "procedural."

I've done some level design; it's fun, but also an absolute pain because of the monotonous bullshit you have to do. You can't be a good level designer without fundamentally understanding the game you're designing for, either.

The best level design comes AFTER a game is launched, and almost always by the actual customers/players because they understand what they're playing and why things need to be built in a certain way.

Let's take a quick look at a really simple example: Space Station 13
A LOT of people who design maps for this game don't even get the basics of combat or movement, let alone the gameplay elements related to atmospherics, fire, AI controls, communication, cameras, etc. etc. But the most basic thing is movement - anyone who's played dwarf fortress will also begin to understand this inherently - you cannot have 1-tile-wide spaces for any room designed to hold more than 1-2 people. 2-tile hallways are okay for perhaps 5-10, so long as they keep moving and don't stop. 3-tile is the minimum for 30+

Rooms need to take into account pathways in and out of the room and accommodate more than one person being in them. You also need a sense of aesthetic for interior design so that a room 'flows' and isn't disjointed as fuck - like a desk that forces you to run 90% of the way around the room, and then back; players will just cheat that sort of thing and jump over your stupidly placed obstacles.

You can't procedurally generate love.

Just the usual nVidia grafx card

Wrong

other than the hair style, clothes, and name,
that'd be general chick from akame ga kill.
it just werks

heh

You can't generate your own waifu. Your waifu chooses you.

Get well soon, dragon ;_;

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delete this

Fucking idiots must have never made something as simple as a dev CS level or a mini campaign to anything between doom and half-life 2.
Shit is not hard when you have decent level building software and not 3ds max

The future is now.

fixed

What a crapload of pretentious shit.

Wew. Kill yourself, enlightened game design guru.

Ubisoft forces him to design the most generic, soulless, fun-crushing "gamespaces" possible. Of course even this dipshit will realize a few pages of javascript banged out by a retarded "web coder" could do his job.

Just put a revolver in your mouth with half the chambers loaded, then pull the trigger. Same thing, only faster.

The last one is an architectural floor-plan. Nothing more.

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Had he stopped at advanced, this would be an okay image.

That's the beauty of it. He lulls you into a false sense of security then drops these little tidbits like "I'm not saying the right-most is the best level, but it'd be the most "well-crafted."
He even goes the extra mile and puts the full-stop inside the quotation marks.
He lists CS:GO under expert and you end up with a subtle cue to start a quake vs cs argument. This shitpost has so many levels of complexity it's incredible.

Get Well Soon Dragon

Give LevelLord his job.

I think they are just making Doom WADs

So being able to build a good house in the Sims is basically Expert Level Game Design?

Boy , no wonder the fucker hates his jobs, Casuals have been doing it better then him for like a decade and a half now.

Get Well Soon Dragon

Get Well Soon Dragon

Dwarf Fortress

But besides that, you're right.

Better yet, a Pokemon.
Burnado, I chose you!

I get complaining about that "video game level" feel, but that has very little to do with the physical shape of the map. It's about levels that feel like they were made for a purpose other than being a video game level, like they would actually have a utility that fits their theme. A factory level that seems like it could have actually made things, a city level with a layout that would actually halfway function as a city, that sort of thing. Which, depending on the concept, could indeed be very blocky and geometric.

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I did a shitty graduate thesis on this subject matter.
First of all, as everyone knows, hand-made levels made by talented professionals will always be better in comparison to randomly generated levels.
If you want to make a proper high-quality random map/level generator, you'll spend more time doing it than doing it by hand. Even then there's no guarantee that the levels produced by it will be good, since there's no actual measure or sure way to know what makes a level "good".
There's too many variables, and the biggest one is gameplay. The smallest gameplay changes can make a good map turn into a shitty map, for example, if you reduce the player's walkspeed suddenly large maps will be a worse experience for the player.
You could use evolutionary AI/deep learning to try and get the best maps possible, but even then you'd need player input. A lot of player input. So it would take a lot longer than what's normal (human designs map, tests it himself and then tests it with players) since the algorithm would need tens of thousands of matches to work, while a human designer would need hundreds of matches.
A solution to that could be to first implement AI bots that play like humans and simulate matches in a fraction of what they would actually take for humans to play (10 min match = 10 seconds since the game can be run at inhuman speeds), but that's another fucking huge can of worms.

So what we'll actually get is a generic shitty level generator since the industry is composed either of washed up or lazy devs.

The only way to have the best of both worlds is to have a good random level generator that can spew a load of shitty maps, but these maps (or parts of them) are then used as a base for a human designer to get some inspiration.

Now that's a slowpoke

I'll take your job faggot. Its not like I could do any worse.

Who here likes doom?

Bloodborne.

So you're just talking about making maps for like, arena shooters? I'm all about single player games, preferably the sort of games where you can explore new places and/or interact with the environment in new ways as you get new abilities, so how would automating that sort of level design go?

TRIGGERED

Whelp. I'm off to work as a level designer I guess.
Wait, that sounds horrible since games these days regressed to "Beginner" because "m-muh open world

Yeah, my thesis focused on arena shooters, but you can still see the same problems reflected on single-player maps.
The biggest problem is that the levels will be played by humans, and humans have different tastes, a level can be good for player A, but terrible for player B since their play styles differ.
I'd say that single player maps would be harder to produce since the focus of the maps is to give satisfying challenges to the player and not bore him to death. Multiplayer maps are easier in comparison since all that you do is make an arena for other players to kill each other (their boredom hang mostly on their adversaries, less on the map), they don't need pacing, cool stuff to look at, enemy positioning, etc. they just need to be designed with pure gameplay in mind.

So you're kinda extra fucked.
When designing single player maps you need player input, like in multiplayer maps, but you need a secondary kind of input: blind player input (someone who is playing the map for the first time).
AI won't help you at all with single player maps (especially if your game has puzzles). Maybe with combat-only maps to test if there's enough ammo/supplies for the player to survive or if there's no sudden difficulty ramp-up (altough this may be something you want in your map)

get well soon dragon

Maybe you could go for an AI that checks how the players are doing time-wise/whatever with certain aspects of the map (combat,puzzles/etc) and if he's doing badly/well in these aspects you'd make the next level have less/more of those.
For example a player is doing really well in combat, loses almost no health and is killing a lot of monsters in a short time, I would assume that this player is finding combat easy. Next level I'll add more/harder monsters.

The real problem would be this.

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Are you implying that an arena shooter in an overly complex skate park, where players are able to choose from running, roller blades, skateboards, and bicycles (each with their own benefits and drawbacks) in order to improve their mobility vertically and /or horizontally wouldn't be entirely fucking rad?

You know what?
This is everything wrong with modern gaming, polish to things that don't need it (like story and voice acting) and the death of the real art-form of gaming (level design, enemy design, enemy encounter design, etc.)

INFERIOR BEINGS

There's a lot of problems with modern gaming, there isn't just one singular problem. A very big problem however, are rejects that couldn't make it in hollywood who think movies and video games are the same thing so they pump all their time and energy into stories (that end up being shitty because they're hollywood rejects).

Guess the full elfs win again.

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Get well soon Dragon

I very much doubt that with the fucking ruskies making ads for their gambling sites.

"GET WELL SOON DRAGON"

well, technically speaking I don't care if the level was designed by organic or AI

get well soon dragon

I was such a fucking faggot back then.

Bless the japs, fucking neat

Get Well Soon Dragon

Get well soon dragon!

what country is that ? are the people so fucking poor or stupid ?

Paper houses are a thing in the US for some insane reason. I have no idea why you would want to live in one.

DF is literally the only outlier. The combined power of nograffix and endless autism turned it into what random gen wishes it was but never gets enough love to actually become.

The power of autism works regardless of graphics
It's just that in DF things don't have to make visual sense, they can get away with just plain not making sense, so even if a monster has three-headed cocks for armpits and 12 lazy eyes you can still imagine it looks like satan as drawn by michelangelo

The bigger technical hurdle is 3D

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They said letting marxists into video games wouldn't create a new vector for cultural marxism to seep in

They said we were crazy for being intolerant to any creeping of SJWs, women, and otherwise leftist windbags into vidya

They said we were crazy for even saying that liberals and marxists push their shitty indoctrination into everything they do

But if you're shit at level design, that would still translate directly into being shit at making procedurally generated levels

Made me laugh way harder than normal.

Anyway, I'd hire Rocksteady's level designer. Those fags are very good developers. As for the faggots who did the port, I'm pretty sure they deserve to be drowned in acid.

That's just a little fire whirl, basically just a flaming dust devil.
This is a fire tornado. From Australia because of course it is.

Get Well Soon Dragon

Of course it wouldn't happen, you need creative acumen to be able to make a video game that is actually interesting, unique, and fun

It's the fucking US.
The only thing they're good at is bragging about all the countries they destroyed and serving Israel.

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METH

Too bad S4 League is p2w as shit

But that's wrong. The earlier picture was right, the level design in CS GO maps is pretty damn good.

This is a completely trash picture

get well soon dragon

I read it assuming it was written by a woman. That's how much of a beta cuck he is.

Procedurally generated levels are almost always shit by default though because it is near impossible to make it both complex and not buggy as fuck

Diablo did it in 1996, and then again in Diablo 2 which had outdoor areas. It's just a bunch of premade puzzle pieces that fit together in various ways, and then they get randomly put together. It's nothing special.

It's just laziness that makes it shit
The same laziness that makes normal levels shit

What are some examples of good dungeon design?

But the dungeons and crypts in that are awful.

Goddamn invisible wizard battles.

Ubi soft, the company who supports doxing!

M&M series.

'MURRKA

I'd say procedural generation could work, but you actually need content to fill it up. You can't just make a procedurally generated world and just stick 4 or 5 different things into it to make a 100 things.

I follow a general rule of thumb that for every big "space" you make you need to make twice the content for it in order for it to work and that's a minimum. The problem with most modern devs is that they do it as a copout so they don't have to design as much when in reality it only works if you do twice the work.

its simple to be a level designer all you have to do is make a path for the player from point A to point B but what is going on now is that people dont really care, or dont find it necessary for the story or genre of the game. this lead to people not given a crap about the design of the level thus it is mostly just a line with a few turns.

i do level design for custom maps in source, let me tell you something about level design that i do and that these people fail to do, detours to make levels longer, the chase to add difficulty, blockers to make the player explore the map, and thats just to name a few. these people dont give a crap at all, or just put in min amount of effort just to get it over with.

Look at Overwatch, one of worst map design in FPS. It's just pure shit, China KotH map is ok and one of Greek KotH maps, but other ones are just bottleneck after bottleneck whit bad spawn points.

It's because masonry is virtually a lost art in America, and the only people who can afford to use it in construction of their homes are making $250k+ a year. Most people can't afford to buy a house, period, and landlords/developers prefer to minimize costs unless they're explicitly building in a high-class subdivision, for which they will charge exorbitant rents.

OP has touched on a truth that a lot of people here need to pick up on and take into AGDG:

To find out what you're good at, find what form of incompetence pisses you off the most. If you understand it well enough to get angry and list why it's wrong, you have an understanding required to do it better.

Dungeon Siege (the early dungeons, the later ones are just hallways).
Most of the Dungeons & Dragons Online maps are really well done.

Knowing when something is bullshit doesn't mean you're able to do better. Go to Holla Forums or /g/ and you'll find lots of pseudo experts who get mad at perceived incompetence while doing the dumbest shit themselves (read any crypto thread and despair). What you propose mostly creates more of these people.

Dungeon Travelers 2 has some crazy maps. Some have mine fields, invisible wall mazes, teleport mazes, anti magic zones, and all sorts of shit. I need to get into more of these games.

Or, you know, basic wood construction is structurally stable enough for most parts of the country and brick and mortar aren't needed outside of fucking tornado alley. No fucking shit a giant explosion is going to send shit through siding and plywood.

It's like you don't even watch the Olympics.

They're also good at cheating and blaming Russia.

You are the saltiest nigger.

Only anglo scum has the right to cheat, stay mad slavtard.

You brought home double the medals that the UK did.

And it only took you 5 times the population to do it. Truely exceptional.

Armies of overpaid artists who don't give a shit about making good games aren't efficient either, ubisoft.

No it doesn't because it will be randomly generated. The end result you will be seeing the same dungeon over and over again with minor changes

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i think the point he was making is that if you have enough set pieces then the changes wouldn't be minor.
Instead of having 10 palette swaps of the same skeleton with different stats, you could be drawing a small set out of some fuckoff huge monstrous manual to populate a dungeon.

Get Well Soon Dragon

UK also beat china, but with less than 5% of the population, nice one huckleberry

also beating mutant gooks at sports isnt hard, if they cant cheat not even their eugenics programs can help them win

Enemies variety and level design are 2 different things.

get well soon dragon

whats happening with USA's arms in the last panel?

You are one dumb nigger

I'm not the nigger who is dumb here.

I said set pieces and monsters are one type of set piece used in procedurally generated dungeons. I don't really know what you consider level design to be, but you've got some pretty shit dungeons if monsters aren't part of their design.

Automation is nice, but doesn't make sense everywhere.

With something like level design, if you try to automate you end up with procedurally generated content like No Man's Sky or Minecraft. Which is just shit.

I don't think you understand how it works if you think it's only purpose is to generate the same dungeon over and over again

where are you even pulling that strawman from?

One of these things is not like the other

american exceptionalism: being so fat you grow extra limbs of fat

Nigga, I understand what you think you're saying and I'm going to tell you. You're retarded.

Even procedurally or "randomly generated" shit like minecraft or Terraria follows molds and throws in content into it's "randomly generated" worlds.

get well soon dragon

I think that the other user was pointing out that TBoI or Diablo-style random maps work because they're hand-crafted pieces stitched together.
Personally I dislike even that because after a while you recognize each part and the main draw of being unique every time is lessened when you recognize each part. It's especially bad when there aren't enough individual parts, like in NuCOM 2.
I haven't done nested spoilers in the two years on fullchan, sorry in advance.

True, but that's more a problem with the steam workshop than with the mapping community. There are still several genuine, high quality maps that are being released every week, along with there several mapping contests to encourage more people to try making/finishing maps.

Get Well Soon Dragon

Well, that's how pretty much every game does dungeons
And really, all the pieces are always going to be hand-crafted, it's just a matter of how many pieces you want to deal with

You're just salty that you only got the bronze in cheating while 'Murika took the gold.

Diablo 2 was filled with pre-made assets and areas. The rest of the levels were padding.

Always is a very long, as the saying goes.

In 100 years computer-generated levels will always beat human-designed ones.

The only thing DF did that other procedural world generators fail to do was add a lot of parameters and variables to the generation algorithm.

Shitty game devs never seem to consider the "repetition length" or "fun density" of their random map generators. It's actually quite easy to calculate how far the player has to walk, on average, before they start seeing the same type of terrain and content being repeated. It's also quite easy to calculate how far the player has to walk between one fun thing and another. The distance to fun should always be much smaller than the repetition length, otherwise you end up with bland, repetitive maps which rapidly get boring and predictable.

Using procedural generation to lengthen a game isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it should be used sparingly between lovingly crafted sections to make a game seem vast.

I cant really think of a game that's done this yet because everyone is trying their hardest to be the china of videogames. Shit quality high content

I think there's a huge difference between games which try to tell a story and games which let the player create their own story. Games with a fixed story which railroad the player through a series of challenges which they must overcome to advance are better served by hand-crafted (or AI-crafted) maps. The player is going to be restricted to a small number of paths through the world so any effort spent on design is definitely going to be seen by plenty of players.

Hand-crafting maps for a game where you want the player to create their own story is just grossly inefficient. At the very least designers should be starting from a procedurally generated base and manually fine-tuning it.

That's…that's where the full stop belongs in any quote that isn't academically formatted.

I thought the phrase went "Eternity, my friend, is a long fucking time"

Level design has worsened because shit like this is trending, and has been already for the last five or so years, at least:

There's more of course. Bottom line is when everything is more "open" and "open ended", you have to spend less time on making a cohesive theme and synergy between elements. Oh, and add "character creation" to the mix. 70 genders and counting will probably be the norm before too long. In Nu-males Sky, the creatures have all kinds of genders you can think of except male and female.

All these are EXCUSES for laziness and poor design.

Accounting for population numbers and medals won/results, my country (only 4 million) is fucking insane.
Especially considering that most athletes train like Rocky - with shit, because they got no sponsors or money.

I'm old….

oh hey, it's this guy

bullshit.
There is no set rule how a floor plan must look. That depends on the setting, atmosphere, location and many other factors.

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get well soon dragOn

Get well soon dragon

Well no wonder he doesn't know shit about making video games then.

I guess he is tired of being the most expendable person on a design team. He wants to be a big boy and write his widdle codes now.

kek what a faggot

A message from the Lord! God be praised!