Mass Effect 3 - Interview with Level Designer Raylene Deck

The Bioblog has been updated with an interview with ME3 Level Designer Raylene Deck. Topics include what she does at Bioware, advice for those who want to get into the industry, what she is playing at the moment and much more. A sample

What does an average day look like for you?
As a level designer, I think an average day really depends on which stage of development we’re working on. If it’s the beginning of the project, I will be in a lot of meetings to discuss what kind of level we want to make. We’ll figure out the overall story, setting and gameplay, and from there, I will start making the level layout. If it’s mid-production, we have the bones of the level figured out and so now I would be doing tasks such as combat layouts, boss fight mechanics or exploration puzzles. At this time, I’m working very closely with my artist, writer, gameplay designer and cinematic designer to figure out all the details of the level and most importantly, make the level fun. If it’s getting close to the time of shipping the game, the level is already fun so now it’s time to fix all the bugs. I switch gears and work with the QA team. Some of the bugs I’ll be fixing range from logic errors, memory and frame rate issues or collision problems.

More information.

talking to level desingers in the QA phase is not really an interesting thing