games continue to become more complicated, designers will specialize more and more,
and having multiple people working on a single level will become increasingly common.
Keeping the game focused on such a project will be quite a challenge, which empha-
sizes the importance of project leaders and lead level designers. However, as people
specialize in a particular area of level design, the possibility exists that they can become
better at their specific area of expertise as a result, raising the bar in terms of final qual-
ity. Furthermore, if one person sets up the AI and gameplay for all of the levels in the
game, those levels as a whole may achieve a greater gameplay consistency than if each
level designer was setting up her own gameplay. If managed correctly, these highly spe-
cialized level designers and artists can lead to better levels in the final game.
Collaboration.................................
As games have grown in complexity, the number of level designers required for a par-
ticular game has increased. Whereas one designer used to be able to truly control every
last facet of a game’s design, now a lead designer must find level designers she can trust
to build levels that will make a significant contribution to the game’s design. Though a
lead designer may be able to look over the shoulder of these level designers and do her
best to direct the efforts, in the end she has delegated a large part of the gameplay’s cre-
ation to these invaluable members of her team. This can have both a good side, as more
voices in the game’s design may make the game a more robust experience, and a bad
side, as the clarity of artistic vision becomes diluted by so many different people work-
ing on the project. Such are the perils of most all modern commercial game
development.
474 Chapter 23: Level Design