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Neil Alphonso to Speak About Level Design at GDC Europe
Written by badman on 19 July, 2010 - 17:45 | Tagged
This year's GDC Europe is fast approaching and Brink's Lead Designer Neil 'Exedore' Alphonso has taken it upon himself to represent Splash Damage there as part of a panel about level design. Titled The Tao of Level Design: A Study of 3 AAA Games, the session will strive to find out just what makes an effective level designer. Neil's panel-partners in crime will be EA DICE's Elisabetta Silli and Remedy's Mikael Kasurinen, and the three of them will be using Alan Wake, Mirror's Edge and Brink as practical examples to share their advice with the audience.
The panel is currently scheduled for 17 August at 9 AM - visit its details page for the full description and details. More about GDC Europe can be found on the official website.
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Comments
Edit: Ah ha! Keep an eye on http://www.gdcvault.com. Seems that everything ends up there afterwards.
I'll probably post my slides again on slideshare, and you could just ask questions here. At 9am, I don't think the whole 'talk' part will be very spectacular.
A link to the slides once they are online would be nice, though. There seem to be some videos and a couple of slides already in the free section at gdcvault. I'll make sure to have a look at that when I get some free time.
Köln is a lovely city regardless though, and a relatively short train ride from Nederland.
You mention flanking routes, if there's one frustration of have with playing objective based games with some people is them often being too focused on the objective, often only taking the shortest path to it and ignoring the other routes.
Ditto with people not understanding the importance of high ground.
It will be interesting to see how this goes for Brink, there is of course the potential for it to be mitigated by the combination of people just wanting to try out the movement/climbing everywhere, and the fact that some routes are made for this.
The routes mentioned there being somewhat asymmetrical are really interesting, with previous games movement systems you could have a route one sided for a team (ie ramp from one side to a drop at the other), but with the varying movement of the body types you now get more options to how you want to set up the route/who you want to let through.
The talk went pretty well I thought, unfortunately there was a technical problem so my slides were very dark... at least the speaking part went alright though, and even though Locki had warned me about the use of humour in Germany, I got the laughs when I was going for them.
I think human nature is to try to take the shortest path, in all things. It takes a while for SMART to really get into people's heads as it's something fundamentally different from other shooters. People who are natural flankers (which I definitely am) fall in love with it instantly.