[game_edu] Teaching Level Design

[Leo Moreno]

At my side of the world, there are obvious challenges that restrict us at the HS level...mostly dealing time allotment.  What has worked for us (in progress):

Class of 32 student are split into two groups of 'companies', each company competes with each other to see who will get published by the school (the school aka Teacher, puts out the criteria just like a real company).  With each company, the students are divided into the different production phases (Pre / Production / Post) with two students managing each company (one student is the Project Manager, the other the Production Manager).  The first quarter the instructor completely focuses on the use of the software used in each of the relative industries while each additional quarter a few days a week are allotted for instruction time to cover general topics and academics.  Students work towards their company designing a game three days a week submitting work based on a time line.  The managers work directly with the instructor for support and advice while presenting bi-monthly on progression in front of the class.  

In general the teams work exclusively on their own, the instructor job is initial software training, game production theory, time line management.  Our biggest challenge is time, with only one hour a day five days a week with other academia required of us, we are constantly remaking ourselves.  On the basis of software, we originally went the route of industry available editors (UT / Quake) but the learning curve for students to learn the software did not allot time to even finish post-production.  We then went with 
free Indie type of engines which resulted in finishing a game from pre to post production but with little game play or fun out of them.

This year we went with FPS Creator.  This restricts us to FPS games, but like the industry seems to be the dominate genre especially for HS students.  The software is not Halo3, but good enough to make Halo1 type of games with the ability to fully customize the engine from its default kiosk mode.  With very little money for industry software (Maya, Photoshop, etc).  We had to be creative at the same time find tools that still allow fast learning curve but still powerful enough for creation.  Other than FPSCreator, we use Google Sketchup (free), GIMP (free photoshop alternative), iClone3 (cutscenes), Blender (free) as the backbones with a sprinkle of many other free software.


My focus of the class is for every student to create content towards the game just as in a real company with a full fledged working game marketed.  I recruit students that have skills in the areas needed for each design phase rather than the techies or gamers (artist, story writers, web designers, marketers, etc).  Every student wants to make their own game, but they are either incomplete or downright not fun.  The student learns less as they have to work on all aspects of the production therefore learning how use the software vs content creation.  Next year we will focus on producing only learning type of games for elementary which will remove the oh so military & horror type of games that FPS is associated with.  The perspective is what we want from FPS but not the shoot-em-up.

Leonard A. Moreno - InfoTech Instructor
FalconTech Pathway
Regional Occupational Programs
Palmdale High School
(661) 273-3181 x.362
http://infotech.phsfalcons.org
"No Child Left Unplugged"



>>> David Wessman <wessmaniac at gmail.com> 2/22/2009 11:40 AM >>>

Hello all,
For those of you teaching level design courses, I'd like to share
information and see if there's much agreement on methods and course
materials. I've taught with and without a textbook, though I prefer using a
well-organized textbook. I usually start with paper exercises, and then move
on to increasingly sophisticated editors.

The most recent book I've used is Beginning Game Level Design by John Feil
and Marc Scattergood (2005). It's an adequate text that comes with Sandbox
(the level editor for Far Cry.) The lessons are therefore slanted toward FPS
games, despite its attempt to be somewhat editor and genre agnostic.
Unfortunately, it's feeling out of date now, and I haven't found a good
replacement yet. I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

The last level design class I taught required students to learn three
different editors and create a basic level in each. I allowed students to
choose the editors they wanted to learn, since they were going to be
teaching themselves the hands on use of the tools. I only stipulated that
one of the editors had to be for FPS games (most students chose UE3 or
Sandbox 2), one had to be for an RTS or RPG (most students chose Warcraft
III for the RTS, and either Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2 or TES: Oblivion for
the RPG), and the third could be anything they wished (many chose the
opposite of what they chose for the 2nd, and several chose Trackmania or
Little Big Planet.)

I guided them through the theory and practice, but they had to figure out
the tools on their own. Part of this involved finding whatever help they
could from community and publisher websites, and sharing that with their
classmates. This led to the creation of a school Wiki page devoted to design
tools in the hopes of creating an institutional body of knowledge that will
help ease the learning curve on future students. One of the things the class
struggled with was the paucity of beginner-level tutorials. There's a fair
amount of friendly advice and tutorials out there on how to do many of the
trickier things, but hardly any handholding for the students who've never
touched a game editor before.

The best part of the class was the student presentations of their levels and
their reports on the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools. This
afforded the class an opportunity to compare and contrast the tools in terms
of features and functionality, but more importantly in terms of ease of use
and reliability. Perhaps the most valuable lessons they learned are the
importance of good work habits and good tools.

So, here are a few questions for you:
Do any of you use a similar approach?
Do any of you teach level design using a single editor for an entire course?
What are your favorite editors for teaching level design?

Thanks for reading,
David Wessman