Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

It depends. You can have mood concepts that usually come before, that describe a mood. For example, let's do a flagship landing zone. It could be like Lorville, and they put down dusty plaza, big high walls. It just gives you a sensation of what the impression and the feeling of the location should be. And then usually these mood concepts are something that the level designer takes and starts to put together streets or whatever it might be that feels like it. A layout that feels all right: you have the street, you have whatever side alleyways, whatever it might be. Then that can be sent back to concepts and they do an overpaint of that. Basically they paint over what Antoine is doing here, for example. They would choose a nice angle of this and they would just take an image and start painting it over with their amazing skills, basically dressing it with a paintbrush rather than having an environment artist go in and dress it, and then we get an idea of what it would actually look like. And these overpaints then also help the environment artists later on to know how they will dress the location, and also identify what kind of pieces we need to build. But that is one of the tricky things about being a level designer as well: it looks easy sometimes, but the ability to create spaces and shapes that just feel good, that feel like they belong together and like a natural, real environment, is quite tricky. Anyone can download any editor at the moment and open it and try to put a room together. And I bet your first attempt is going to be interesting.