Where did you get started with this? Did you start with building Legos, building rooms and halls and connectors, or was there a mod tool for a certain game? How do you get into level design?
TL;DRThe speakers describe different routes into level design: Minecraft and game editors for one, Warcraft 3 and Gothic or Risen followed by a German game design course and QA work for the other.
I guess everybody has a different background on that. For me, I think it's funny to say, but I think Minecraft really helped to get the sense of space and scale and just what makes sense, what feels cool to build and so on. But then I jumped into editors to try to build games out of these editors, and also other game engines before getting into the industry, just building games and so on. And I focused on level design; building worlds and just thinking about the spatial aspect of things is something that I like.
On my end, when I was young, I played around a bit with Warcraft 3, for example, but that was just more on the side. But when I was playing games like the Gothic or the Risen series, this is when it actually started getting me interested, and I really wanted to do this for a living. Because for level design, you actually see what you're building in the editor in the game, rather than in game design, where you do more theoretical stuff and do a lot of write-ups and things like that. So it was always more appealing to me to build something in the editor and have the freedom and try to abuse some of the assets or play around and just create a location, and also a bit of scripting and all that stuff.
Where'd you get your start, Manuel? What was the thing that made you go, I want to do this?
Well, it's just all the logic of the spatial aspect of it that made it very appealing. And when I realized that I could do that as a job, that's when I was like, oh yeah, I'm doing it.
After I knew what I wanted to do, I actually looked around at how you can get into the industry or into the job. In Germany, they actually have schools for that. At the time, it was just, I think, two. So I just applied there and I took a course in game design and level design. Once I was done, I looked for jobs in the industry and I started working for a 3D browser game and did some fantasy-type, top-down level design. In between, I also did a few years of QA, which was also quite interesting, to see how all the other departments and how testing and everything works. It's quite a different point of view. And at some point, I showed up at Andreas's door.