I see people here using this description a lot: Sock, Scampie, Warren, etc.

I'd like to know: why people quit level design jobs and where do they go after? What are they doing now for a living? 

Professional game development is soul crushing no matter how good a studio you're at. Either it's quickly soul crushing or slowly soul crashing. Souls will be crushed no matter what.

Also the kind of level design that we associate with Quake/Doom/etc doesn't really exist in modern game design any more. It's all sectioned off into different departments so noone really gets to feel as if they own the finished product. 

Probably still has a lot of the gratification as old school game design 

In my experience, the first two years were pretty much "OMG this is so cool I'm maeking games!!1", but around year 3 that illusion began to fall apart and I became aware of just what a burnt-out jaded husk of a man I had become, and how fucking empty the life actually was. My sentence was stretched out to 8 years before I found a sensible alternative career (I'm doing stuff in the music festival biz for now).

I think a lot of the problems stem from a culture where insane hours are just expected with no questions. "Oh you don't want to work evenings and weekends for 6 months straight? Well we'll just sack you and take on three enthusiastic kids fresh out of university whose combined salaries will be less than what we're currently paying you." (Yes they said this exact thing to a friend of mine).

The work itself almost never ever comes close to the fun of hobby work, because for most people they will be brick-in-the-wall types working on one aspect of the game that's unlikely to make them feel like they have much creative control or ownership. It can be possible to work yourself up to a key position where you have a lot of creative control, and - if you can do this whilst also avoiding becoming a lead - then that can be rewarding. (Being a lead usually fucking sucks typically because all your time is spent managing other people, and putting out fires).

It also doesn't help that the majority of people in the office are socially retarded manchildren. 

so true 8`( 

That's exactly it. And it hurt my inner child... 

That's exactly it. And it hurts my inner child... 

Kinn has obviously taken up game development, and thinks it sucks. I agree with him. I have a friend who wants to be his own game developer, and he is going to take a couple years to get a game done. He thinks he is going to make a huge profit, but I just can't see it happening. There is a sea of games made by individuals rushing in every day, and I feel that it is going to be impossible for him. He already has no money, a shit job with shit pay, and has to support his brother and his mother because they can't do it themselves. I just really don't want him after his game is released, getting no money for it, people strongly criticizing him, realizing all of the work was for nothing, destroying his dreams, and getting rid of his plans in the future based off of the profit he is expecting to make. I honestly don't know what to tell him other than good luck. 

Try to convince him to start small and that he has higher chances of success by developing 12 2-month games, than 1 2-year game.
Worst case scenario - users shit on his game in comments and reviews, no real profit etc etc etc, but he only wasted 2 months. 

I can't really convince him, but I can try to tell him to start out small. He is trying to make an action RPG with a super deep story line, and huge world. He NEEDS to start smaller. He has published one other game I know about, and it's a mobile game that is alright. He needs to make a simple action game before going full RPG. 

I've been in the industry for 10 years now, and it's still treating me fairly well. Yeah it's not perfect, but it's still better than whatever random jobs many of my friends are doing (and continually complaining about).
But yeah finding a good company and/or team is really hard. Oh and I've never done level design, the job must also be quite different. 

You don't need to know much, it's fun to work on, and you don't need to be a pro. I've been learning here, and it's been a great experience. 

Doing level design... or anything else for that matter, as a hobby and professionally is completely different experience.

@SpecialBomb
5 years?! Holy shit, he is going to burn out much earlier.
Anyhow, it would be wise to keep his "shit job" just in case. 

Trying to make an indie game on your own is not really anything like working in a proper game studio tbh. In an established game studio at least you have a salary.

It sounds like your friend is in a mess financially, but trying to make a homebrew game in the hope that it will make money at the end, is probably the worst possible thing he could be doing in that situation.

In my experience (and I have done some indie stuff before) if you can't get proper financial backing at the start of the project, don't even fucking think about it. 

He is pretty much fucked. He only has a laptop to work on. Also, he isn't giving up his job.
I really don't want him in any lower of a state than he is now. He is doing pretty much everything besides music for his game, and he is making it in GameMaker. I just can't support him when it's obvious that the gained yield after all of this will be negative. Where we live, there are absolutely no jobs involving IT, and everything is pretty much just labor. He can't go to the city and live there, because he couldn't pay for it unless he gets a job that he knows will pay for it. It's pretty bad for him, and he wants to follow his dreams even if they hurt him in the long run. I just think he should get off his feet first before he does something this detrimental. 

Oh good lord :( 

My friend knows how to use it very well. He doesn't use the whole drag and drop thing, he scripts everything himself.

But still, GameMaker... 

Googling for "list of gamemaker games" turns up a surprising amount of familiar good games. So it's possible to beat it into shape. 

Are you working with games in Fortaleza?? That's awesome.

Kinn

Thanks a lot for the feedback. Resembles a lot my IT career and probably most careers in an "industry" production model. 

Great question. I feel like there should be some kind of path for people who have game industry specific skills (like level / game design) because holy shit did I feel completely useless trying to figure out what that would be.

I had an almost 2 year hiatus from making games professionally, and during that time I thought about doing something else to pay the bills but I was turned down for *every* job I applied for outside of games. And I'm talking about near minimum-wage jobs in some cases because they all said I was overqualified and why would I want a job selling espresso machines or whatever when I'd been working on all these games.

The longer you do any job, the harder it is to start over and do anything else. At least that's been my experience so far. 

The longer you do any job, the harder it is to start over and do anything else. At least that's been my experience so far.

After 15 years in a specific professional domain, this make things significantly harder even though the desire to change is high... Potentially everything has to be learn from scratch, or almost... and that's really hard for middle age guy to change... *sigths* 

@czg

When we developed Payday 1, me and my buddy Ilija worked very much alone with great responsibility, more or less how you work at home with your own stuff. We designed and built the levels from whitebox up to shippable, that included the gameplay, scripting, art-pass and lighting.

From the start it was only us, then a third level designer joined, but all in all, we worked a lot, slept at the office and in the end, turned out a really fun game.

I've worked 10+ years now as a "Professional Level Designer" with various projects.
These days I'm running my own biz, which me and a friend started, that was 3+ years ago.

@SpecialBomb
Really, try and convince your friend to start with a smaller thing first, it takes ages for a single person to make a long full feature ARPG, even if it's top down.

We started with Hammerwatch as a smaller hack and slash, instead of a larger RPG, just because we kinda "knew" that you can't make a real ARPG in short time and keep the quality up. We worked full time for 9 months with that, developed our own engine, made more or less all art, all levels, tweaked etc etc

Had we we gone for the initial idea and done a real diablo clone, we would still be sitting with it I guess... (maybe not, but you get the idea).