4 ms·

The incredibly low skill floor is definitely a big part of the scene's success. I know a number of veteran professional level designers are kinda worried about

The incredibly low skill floor is definitely a big part of the scene's success. I know a number of veteran professional level designers are kinda worried about the field. So many of them got their starts playing around with the level creation stuff that frequently came with PC games. It got them interested and allowed them to walk before they could run. So they're a bit afraid a new generation might be starting from less than they had. There's some hope that maybe Minecraft and Roblox will be a younger generation's starting point. Game development is the most accessible it's been in many decades, but level design specifically is perhaps less accessible than it was circa 2000.

dleslie 4y ago
Yep, as a fellow game developer (programmer) I had similar concerns... Until recently. Unity had the issue of the high skill floor of creating meshes for scenes until recently. You can now build reasonable looking unity scenes using a process akin to Hammer and QERadiant; albeit still inferior to those, IMHO. There's also the resurgence of interest in crunchy arcade shooters, using classic engines no less, which is drawing attention to tools like DoomBuilder and TrenchBroom. Annnd VR tools are making complex mesh building a lot more accessible by making it a lot more intuitive.
- mosfetarium 4y ago
  There's definitely been improvements in level editors for existing engines. Hell, if you want to use those old editors, there are even plugins like HammUEr, to use Hammer with Unreal 4 and Qodot to use editors like TrenchBroom with Godot. But I will say there was something particularly special about level editors coming with the greatest games of the day back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not only was this extremely accessible as it meant you could just learn level design, and not the rest of game development, but it meant you got to learn level design for your favourite games, something particularly enticing to young people. You also got a bit of a built-in audience.
bobsmooth 4y ago
Despite it's exploitative nature, I think Roblox will be sited by a lot of people as their first experience with game dev in the future.
unixhero 4y ago
Also, bad and low quality doom levels can be extremely fun to play. There is a fun element to this as well.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  The low quality typically consists of ugly appearance and ridiculous or defective architecture, which rarely impact the fun of shooting monsters too seriously: even mediocre and uninspired careless placement of monsters in boring environments results in decent combat action.
tialaramex 4y ago
I don't see it. Take a look at Mario Maker (and more recently Mario Maker 2). There's a vibrant scene there of creators who've started with "What if the first level of SMB but one off-screen Thwomp? Is that funny?" (Yes) and ended up making one screen puzzles, decent Kaizo (in the sense of levels which require high skill to complete, obviously all of Mario Maker is Kaizo in the other sense) even some of the weird troll sub-categories, like people who all they do is make anti†, without even a "real" course for you to need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NSDxlgMRZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NSDxlgMRZQ †A "softlock" is when it's possible to get into a situation where the player can't win but they also can't die and start over, so they must either restart the game or wait for some in-game timer to count down to zero. In normal course design you should prevent this, if necessary with an "anti-softlock" where Mario assuredly dies once frustrated in this way, e.g. you miss an important jump, and Mario just falls to his death, rather than being stuck in a deep pit from which he cannot escape. But in troll design you make dying in this circumstance possible but extremely difficult, so that the player's skill in tested not only in winning, but also just in dying. This art is called an anti-softlock or most often "anti" for short and is a crucial part of "troll Mario". That's not even on a general purpose computer, a Switch is something you might have purchased or been gifted solely to play video games and now you're a level designer, able to show off your aesthetics, pacing, mechanics and so on. (Java) Minecraft is way beyond that because it's not even just about level design, it goes way beyond even a Doom TC. People change the physics rules, how graphics are rendered, not to mention radically changing the gameplay. I basically only play the ascend-to-godhood type packs, and even among those there's so much variety between something tightly themed like Compact Claustrophobia or Star Factory, and big sprawling do-what-you like packs such as Stoneblock, or Project Ozone. But now you're a video game programmer (albeit in Java) not even just a level designer.
- bariumbitmap 4y ago
  Super Mario Maker 2 is a good example of accessible level creation, but for other players the levels themselves are black boxes. Yes, it's easy to create and upload levels, but downloading and viewing other people's levels in the level editor is simply not allowed on a standard Switch. This is a problem since levels in general are not WYSIWYG: they use e.g. off-screen mechanisms, hidden blocks, and overlapping entities. It took over two years before 3rd-party software could break Nintendo's DRM and give players the privilege of seeing how someone else's level works: https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer and even that effort only evaded a ban for a month or two: https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer/issues/15 https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer/issues/15 https://github.com/TheGreatRambler/toost/issues/9 https://github.com/TheGreatRambler/toost/issues/9

dleslie 4y ago

Yep, as a fellow game developer (programmer) I had similar concerns... Until recently. Unity had the issue of the high skill floor of creating meshes for scenes until recently. You can now build reasonable looking unity scenes using a process akin to Hammer and QERadiant; albeit still inferior to those, IMHO. There's also the resurgence of interest in crunchy arcade shooters, using classic engines no less, which is drawing attention to tools like DoomBuilder and TrenchBroom. Annnd VR tools are making complex mesh building a lot more accessible by making it a lot more intuitive.

mosfetarium 4y ago
There's definitely been improvements in level editors for existing engines. Hell, if you want to use those old editors, there are even plugins like HammUEr, to use Hammer with Unreal 4 and Qodot to use editors like TrenchBroom with Godot. But I will say there was something particularly special about level editors coming with the greatest games of the day back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not only was this extremely accessible as it meant you could just learn level design, and not the rest of game development, but it meant you got to learn level design for your favourite games, something particularly enticing to young people. You also got a bit of a built-in audience.

bobsmooth 4y ago

Despite it's exploitative nature, I think Roblox will be sited by a lot of people as their first experience with game dev in the future.

unixhero 4y ago

Also, bad and low quality doom levels can be extremely fun to play. There is a fun element to this as well.

HelloNurse 4y ago
The low quality typically consists of ugly appearance and ridiculous or defective architecture, which rarely impact the fun of shooting monsters too seriously: even mediocre and uninspired careless placement of monsters in boring environments results in decent combat action.

tialaramex 4y ago

I don't see it. Take a look at Mario Maker (and more recently Mario Maker 2). There's a vibrant scene there of creators who've started with "What if the first level of SMB but one off-screen Thwomp? Is that funny?" (Yes) and ended up making one screen puzzles, decent Kaizo (in the sense of levels which require high skill to complete, obviously all of Mario Maker is Kaizo in the other sense) even some of the weird troll sub-categories, like people who all they do is make anti†, without even a "real" course for you to need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NSDxlgMRZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NSDxlgMRZQ †A "softlock" is when it's possible to get into a situation where the player can't win but they also can't die and start over, so they must either restart the game or wait for some in-game timer to count down to zero. In normal course design you should prevent this, if necessary with an "anti-softlock" where Mario assuredly dies once frustrated in this way, e.g. you miss an important jump, and Mario just falls to his death, rather than being stuck in a deep pit from which he cannot escape. But in troll design you make dying in this circumstance possible but extremely difficult, so that the player's skill in tested not only in winning, but also just in dying. This art is called an anti-softlock or most often "anti" for short and is a crucial part of "troll Mario". That's not even on a general purpose computer, a Switch is something you might have purchased or been gifted solely to play video games and now you're a level designer, able to show off your aesthetics, pacing, mechanics and so on. (Java) Minecraft is way beyond that because it's not even just about level design, it goes way beyond even a Doom TC. People change the physics rules, how graphics are rendered, not to mention radically changing the gameplay. I basically only play the ascend-to-godhood type packs, and even among those there's so much variety between something tightly themed like Compact Claustrophobia or Star Factory, and big sprawling do-what-you like packs such as Stoneblock, or Project Ozone. But now you're a video game programmer (albeit in Java) not even just a level designer.

bariumbitmap 4y ago
Super Mario Maker 2 is a good example of accessible level creation, but for other players the levels themselves are black boxes. Yes, it's easy to create and upload levels, but downloading and viewing other people's levels in the level editor is simply not allowed on a standard Switch. This is a problem since levels in general are not WYSIWYG: they use e.g. off-screen mechanisms, hidden blocks, and overlapping entities. It took over two years before 3rd-party software could break Nintendo's DRM and give players the privilege of seeing how someone else's level works: https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer and even that effort only evaded a ban for a month or two: https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer/issues/15 https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer/issues/15 https://github.com/TheGreatRambler/toost/issues/9 https://github.com/TheGreatRambler/toost/issues/9