About this book / authors
about this book project, its authors, and any credits
The Level Design Book is a free nonprofit project run by volunteers.
About this book
Level design is a bit of a dying art. Modern industrial workflows and the popularity of procedurally generated content mean that level design, as traditionally understood in the 1990s, feels increasingly less relevant to contemporary game genres and trends.
And yet, many games (and companies) still need level designers -- and today's beginner level designers don't have any good learning resources to use.
The past generation of level designers came of age in the 1990s / 2000s, benefiting immensely from the unique bespoke online level design communities of Web 1.5 -- easily sharing and building knowledge with peers. Today, all that knowledge is much less accessible and discoverable. The entire internet has been commodified into a handful of all-purpose social media networks, and search engines have generally become much worse / less helpful.
There are many ways out of a dark age, but here we're going to try a renaissance model and revive the old ways: write words on a page (and edit these words!!), hand-curate links, and centralize information on an independent website external to a social network.
Roadmap
Stage 1: write a book with solid text, links, and illustrations; good coverage on all topics
Stage 2: transform into a living book; follow inspirations like Nature of Code and Book of Shaders, which offer design tools and exercises within the text itself
build a simple web embeddable 3D level design tool with blockout, playtest, and basic game elements
interactive examples
Stage 3: ???
About the authors
Core authors / editors
These people have written the bulk of the text in this book, and collectively edit contributions.
Contributors
These people have contributed substantial research, writing, or assets to the book.
Additional credits
And generally, much of the material from this book comes from many different authors. We strongly believe in the importance of crediting, and we attempt to cite and link back as much as possible. All this attributed content belongs to these respective creators.
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