00:12I'm Colin Campbell, I'm the Lead Level Designer here working on Mass Effect Andromeda in Bioware, Montreal.
00:18So an average day for me is, so I show up, I usually have a little bit of time to
00:22settle in, get some breakfast or drink some tea, catch up on emails that might have come in overnight, and
00:28then I kind of square away from my day.
00:30I take care of how we create levels for Mass Effect Andromeda.
00:33The role of a level designer is equal parts providing gameplay to the player as it is storytelling, as it
00:39is supporting art, as it is taking all those disparate pieces and trying to be one of the pieces of
00:45glue that holds them all together and creates a cohesive experience.
00:48If you're making a big RPG like we're making, they're big moving beasts, so you need to have a team
00:53that's capable of taking vision from high up and populating it out to a game that, in a lot of
00:59cases, all the devs won't see all the parts of it.
01:01So you have to have a really, really good team that's really good at communication.
01:05I might tell a level designer that we need to make a level where we're feeling like you're entrenched, you're
01:10pushing people back from all angles, we want that kind of feeling narratively.
01:15So the level designer might take that experience and try different things, they might look at different enemy compositions, they
01:20might look at different layout compositions.
01:21There's not a lot of micromanaging because people are allowed to try things, fail a little bit, improve.
01:28The team here at BioWare Montreal is a really great mix. We've got folks from all over the industry, we've
01:34got BioWare veterans that have moved out here from Edmonton.
01:37We've got folks that are, this is their first BioWare game, like myself. So it's this wonderful, cool mix of
01:43lots of different people, lots of different personalities, lots of different approaches.
01:46It's a very lively studio.
01:49It's weird to come into work and have conversations that are contextual to games you played before you were part
01:54of the company,
01:55and realize you're talking to the guy who wrote Minsk, and you're talking to the guy who built the Normandy.
02:01There's still weird geek out moments.
02:04Holy crap, you built the tally acquisition mission in M2, and it's like, um, so those, I hope that never
02:10goes away.
02:12So I remember when the E3 trailer came out, when that got shown to the public, that kind of made
02:17it real in a way that you don't get when you're in a meeting room.
02:20This is what we're doing, and people are responding to it, and they're, you know, they're making predictions, and they're
02:25making guesses, and they're asking questions,
02:27and the, the tenor of excitement just skyrocketed.
02:31That was sort of a magical period of time where all of us sort of realized, oh yeah, this is
02:36it.
02:36This is a really fun environment to work in. There's really, really good people here.
02:40So, that, that makes it worthwhile to come into work every day, and just go through eight hours of meetings,
02:45and all the hurdles that come in making a game.
02:49Thank you.
02:49Thank you.
Commenti