DigiPen Level Maker
Goals
Empower students to practice level design
One of the greatest obstacles in practicing level design is the tools that we use. Smaller-scale tools don’t always have strong UX and can limit students’ growth through frustrating or unintuitive interfaces.
Large-scale tools like Unity and Unreal detract from the focus of level design by requiring students to first learn to script their own mechanics and feedback systems.
The DigiPen Level Maker aims to address both these issues by providing students with access to an array of pre-built gameplay systems and a responsive interface that emphasizes rapid iteration.
Enable instructors to review student work
Since the tool serves an educational purpose, the work that it creates needs to be evaluated by instructors. This is often a painful process (as I’ve learned from my own experience as a teaching assistant), requiring the evaluator to download a massive project, import it into the respective game engine, and then parse the project directories to find the relevant material.
The DigiPen Level Maker recognizes that the students are not the application’s only user. The user experience for instructors must also be carefully considered.
Extensibility & Modularity
While designing the DigiPen Level Maker, we also want to keep the future in mind. While a simple platformer with some puzzle tiles is a great starting point for level design, the editor also lays a lot of groundwork that could be useful for teaching new topics, like RPG design or Mission & Quest design in the form of top-down dungeon crawlers.
Careful consideration is given to the project’s architecture to allow future developers to easily extend the editor with new sets of features.
The DigiPen Level Maker is a tool created for the benefit of its namesake institution: DigiPen Institute of Technology. An ambitious project, the editor aims to provide students with a tool to study the fundamentals of level design.