We all know how frustrating it can be to kick off your career as a junior, trying to enter the gaming industry. This is why we wanted to share some industry insights, and are happy to introduce two of our fantastic Level Designers, Vilma Lahtonen and Ecem Kıvılcım. They told us about the steps they took to successfully get into level design. Beyond that, we discussed the challenges they overcame (face your fears!), tips on how to increase your relevance as a candidate applying for level design jobs (make use of the endless amount of online knowledge!), and crucial skills to do great work (hubris kills team collaboration!).
Hi Vilma and Ecem, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
Vilma: Hey, I’m Vilma, I’m originally from Finland and have been in the industry for close to eight years now. I’ve been working in level design most of my career, but have also been doing game design on the side. I started off in the PC and console side of the industry and jumped to the mobile side halfway through. Currently, I’m working on Lily’s Garden, working on all things level design here at Tactile.
Ecem: My name is Ecem and I am from Turkey. I’ve been working as a Level Designer for four years now, solely in the mobile match-3 game industry. I moved to Copenhagen recently to work as a Level Designer on Lily’s Garden too.
How did you become interested in level design and what steps did you take to pursue a career in the field?
Ecem: I’ve always been passionate about games, especially casual mastery, so I wanted to pursue level design as a career. I followed game design blogs and news about the mobile games industry, joined online game communities, such as Game Dev Network and Unity Discord, and then went to work at a studio to gain hands-on experience.
Vilma: Well, my start is pretty similar, I’ve been playing games my whole life. At some point during my teenage years, I became interested in learning about how games actually work in the background, and later decided to apply for an internship at an indie studio in Finland. I then found out that I actually have quite a knack for design, and that’s how my career kicked off.
What skills and qualities do you believe are essential to succeed as a Level Designer?
Vilma: First and foremost, it’s really essential for a designer to be willing to constantly improve. It’s one of the key assets, I think, to be successful in the industry. This goes hand in hand with a willingness to perfect your design whenever necessary because not every design you come up with gets implemented. You need to be willing to rethink your ways, and always stay humble! After all, it’s a big team effort, so collaboration skills and everything tied to that are, I believe, most essential. It certainly also helps if you’re a creative person.
Ecem: Yeah, actually I agree with everything you said, Vilma. Creativity is key, together with problem-solving skills and an openness to feedback. Understanding player psychology is not easy and you need to be open to criticism from other designers. An eye for detail to ensure balanced, engaging gameplay is also crucial.
How do you stay updated with the latest trends and advancements in Level Design?
Ecem: I closely follow all newly released match-3 games and new features added to them, participate in online communities from time to time, follow industry blogs, such as Mobilegamer.biz and PocketGamer, and generally play a variety of games, not only on mobile.
Vilma: Yeah, that would be my answer as well. I also play through different competitors and read through news articles related to the industry and keep an eye on new PC and console titles.
Can you share some challenges you’ve faced in your career as a Level Designer and how you overcame them?
Vilma: I’ve always been quite shy, and I still am. In the beginning of my career public speaking was something I really didn’t do. I just couldn’t, because I used to get panic attacks. It was really bad! Fortunately, this is something both the industry and the role have helped me to overcome. Today, I’m actually really excited to share ideas, speak out about things and designs and keep departments on board with what our team is doing. I’ve become a lot more confident and skilled in my craft by being able to speak openly and to receive feedback from other departments. It definitely helps the project as well when you’re comfortable enough to speak up. This relates also to the fact that, at the beginning of my career, I was super nervous about making mistakes, which I’m not anymore. In retrospect, I actually wish I was more open about mistakes to improve much faster.
Ecem: Yeah, that’s a really good answer. I totally agree with the fear of public speaking because I was struggling with that too. My path started a little differently, because before joining the gaming industry, I was working in the academic field, working mostly on my own. Only after my first job as a Level Designer in a game company, I learned how important it is to be a part of a team and to be open to feedback. I really appreciate that because it makes work so much more fun!
What is the most rewarding aspect of being a Level Designer?
Vilma: I used to think it’s getting your product out to players which is – don’t get me wrong – very rewarding. But it is now much more important to me to have the opportunity to bounce ideas around with people in my team, and to work as a team to achieve something new, fresh and awesome. That, I think, is the most rewarding aspect.
Ecem: I agree that team collaboration is very rewarding. When I go home after work, I feel satisfied because I shared ideas with my colleagues and took a lot of inspiration from them. Other than that, imagining the emotional reactions and sense of accomplishment players experience while playing makes me very happy too.
Vilma: Yeah, I can second that. It’s pretty cool and I don’t think about it anymore, but looking back to when I started in the mobile industry, I was blown away by the number of players who actually play the levels I contributed to.
Ecem: Yeah, I sometimes see people in the metro playing my levels and I feel like, oh, I made this!
What advice do you have for aspiring Level Designers who are just starting their career journeys?
Vilma: So this is going to be cheesy, but believing in yourself is key! Not to the extent where your self-confidence becomes arrogance, because as I mentioned in the beginning: it’s important to stay humble. Another important aspect is that you don’t necessarily need a formal education. You’ll find a lot of knowledge on learning platforms. You can definitely learn Unity or Unreal Engine on your own. Just start from scratch, create your own simple levels so you get to play around with editor tools and features, and if you realize that you like it, working as a designer can be a very rewarding career path for you.
Ecem: Yeah exactly, just try and start creating levels and always seek feedback from peers. Play-test extensively and learn from both successful and unsuccessful designs. Also, following trends in the industry is key, because this industry is changing rapidly. After a while, you’ll have enough small projects to showcase in a portfolio, which is an effective way to illustrate your skills.
Vilma: True! Especially if you’re looking for an entry or junior position, a portfolio helps a lot. It doesn’t need to be perfect because what you’re primarily showing is that you’re enthusiastic and motivated.
Thank you so much for your time and sharing such interesting insights, Ecem and Vilma! ✨🎉
Game development is a complex process. In 2023 alone we created more than 100.000 game builds, which is a huge number! Supporting our games team in the game development process are the brilliant minds of our Core team. Developers responsible for constructing and maintaining our internal infrastructure – all the tools, platforms and systems, entirely built in-house and customized to our specific needs, which enable us to do live game operations.
One of these tools is the Build Server, our internal game building pipeline, which has been for the past 6 months under close inspection from Juan and Vlad (our Backend Engineers extraordinaire). We sat down with them for a chat about how we build our games, why we bother developing our own tools and to discover what improvements the team has been working on this year and why.
How do we build our games?
Our games are built using the Unity engine and every time there are updates to the game projects, such as asset bundles, new product features or in-game events, we create a new game build. For a game developer, this process takes a lot of time and resources from their machine. Despite the fact that today developers’ machines are more efficient and powerful, it can still take hours to compile all the assets into a new build. This is why, several years ago, we decided to build a collection of tools, which enable us to build games faster, in an automated and more efficient way.
Whilst there are companies that provide this service, having our own personalised, internal build pipeline offers us the flexibility to build in a way that suits our specific needs. It’s not uncommon that companies will have a dedicated Build Pipeline Engineer, or use an out-of-the-box solution. It is a necessity for making games. Ultimately, the product that the gaming company delivers is something that gets installed on some sort of a device (whether that’s a mobile phone, console or PC). Creating these game builds is the part that got automated with our Build Server tools.
Think of it like this – there’s two main components of the Build pipeline, the Controller and the Agents. The Controller allows game programmers, level designers and other users to order a build of whatever they are working on within a specific game. They can do so through our internal build dashboard. The build request then goes to a Build Agent, which starts going through a sequence of steps, resulting in an installable build. Besides these on-demand builds, we also have a lot of scheduled building, which normally runs overnight or on a specific schedule. All the ordered and scheduled builds, build agents and their respective statuses can be seen on the build dashboard.
Vlad elaborates: “The internal build pipeline gives our teams whatever flexibility and customisation they might need – whether someone wants to order a build for a game for a specific branch or a specific revision, if they want to run tests and validations, or not, whether they want to run it on Monday at 2pm, or every Tuesday overnight … You get the drill. The Build Server will notify them when the build is done and they can track everything relating to the building process on a user-friendly and consistently running interface.” These tools therefore give us a complete overview and context into each build, and save us a bunch of time that was previously spent looking into individual problems.
‘If you want it done right, do it yourself.’
This is where building our own tools gives us the advantage over using commercial tools. It enables us to make the game building process super flexible and to bend it to our specific needs. We make a lot of custom integrations in our builds and we have made it very easy for us to report on the things happening in the build pipeline.
The Build Agent is only one of the many moving parts of our build tools. However, it is THE part which actually executes ‘the final recipe’ composed for every game. We actually have several Build Agents (148 to be precise), which are all running on ca. 30 Mac Minis. Juan shares a fun fact about this: “We use Mac Minis because we compile new game builds using Xcode, which requires us to use the MacOS. Having our own internal build tools enables us to build things in Xcode for iOS, which is not something that many commercial tools offered nearly a decade ago when we started looking for an appropriate solution.”
Individual agents are set-up in the same way, so that we can reliably know that if the set-up worked for one project, it is also going to work for the others. Another good feature of our build pipeline is that it enables us to upload specific game builds to an app store, instead of our Producers having to do it manually. As Vlad explains: “It’s basically a big collection of tools that contribute to the overall ease of development, in particular by reducing the time that people spend doing repetitive tasks. There’s a lot of things that seem incremental in themselves, but end up adding to a lot.”
Changing things for the better
Juan and Vlad recently rewrote the Build Agents code from an older version of Python into TypeScript. The old code was difficult to maintain, so everything that needed to be added, fixed or modified to the codebase took a lot of time and effort from our development team. It was basically like constantly readjusting a big Jenga tower.
We therefore took the decision to re-do the Build Agents in a language that was comfortable for all our developers. We also took this opportunity to test our new coding patterns and practices. This was a small project to start with (compared to others), but complex enough that it was suitable for trying this out.
The new coding style is centred around dependency injection (DI). DI is a design pattern which promotes loose coupling between components by externalising the dependencies of a class. Instead of a class creating its own dependencies, they are provided, or injected, from the outside.
Applying DI therefore allows us to have total control over the business logic behind the code. To give an example, we have some business logic that says when the build is finished, we need to notify the user. In order to do that, we call a third party library. However, we do not have control over the third party library and have no way of testing that it actually does what we expect it to. But now, with DI, we are able to abstract that library into a third component which we have complete control over. Juan elaborates: “We now feel very comfortable making structural and behavioural changes in our code, because we are more confident that it will behave as it should. We have a big testing infrastructure, more control and a complete overview of its behaviour.”
Vlad goes on to illustrate this with another example: “There are many ways to boil an egg, right? You can boil it in hot water, you can boil it in a microwave, or you can set the house on fire and eventually, this will also make the egg boil.” 🤣
But if you’d rather avoid burning the house down, here’s another metaphor provided by the all-knowing ChatGPT: Imagine you’re building a house. In traditional programming, each room (or class) in your house knows how to make its own furniture (dependencies). With DI, it’s like hiring an interior decorator. You tell the decorator what furniture each room needs, and they bring it in. This way, if you want to change the furniture later, you don’t have to rebuild the whole room; the decorator can just swap it out.
So, applying DI is like having someone else handle the connections between different parts of your program, making it easier to change or upgrade things without messing up the entire system (and burning the house down).
The importance of continuously reiterating on our coding style
Within our team, we always strive towards making our code more maintainable and have an even better quality of life. It’s our long-term vision, and using DI is just one of the target conditions we want to reach on the way there. It is difficult to code consistently at scale in a big team, and to stay cohesive and coherent together. This is why it is extremely useful to have something that can be modified by all of our developers in a comfortable fashion. No matter your role, or your location, you can change something in the codebase and get a fast response into whether this is breaking something or not.
“This is why we need to keep reiterating on our coding style – to keep up to date with the standards and good practices,” says Juan, “As long as technology, languages, customer needs and the gaming market evolve, our style will have to follow. We need to be more agile and quicker to respond to things. If we keep doing things the same way, then we will not be able to stay competitive.”
Time for talent with Kamya Krishnan
Namaste 👋 I’m Kamya, pleasure to meet you! I joined Tactile’s QA team 9 months ago. Beyond playing the developed game, my role involves identifying and reporting any potential problems that could impact the game’s quality and functionality 🔦
Let me share a little bit more about what my team does at Tactile and how I ended up in QA (+ tips for successful QAs at the end!):
🚀 Before Tactile
I started my journey as a Test Engineer in a software services company back home in India. I learned a whole bunch about the software testing process, as well as how to create and execute test cases. After that, I moved into a Test Analyst role, where I focused more on test planning, analysis, and design.
💜 Joining Tactile
Taking a short break during my maternity period, I relocated to Copenhagen with my family. When I returned to work, I transitioned to a QA Engineering role at a Fintech company. This is where I first got familiar with mobile testing and working in an agile environment … which eventually lead me to my current position at Tactile 🙌
As a QA Tester at Tactile, my focus is on ensuring that the weekly releases of our hit game Lily’s Garden go seamlessly, without major crashes or performance glitches. The fact that my contributions directly enhance the overall gaming experience for players is the most fulfilling aspect of my role!
🏗️ What our team does
Within Lily’s Garden, we work in smaller scrum teams. My role as a QA is to plan, design and execute tests relating to the developments of new game features, such as our most recent Gatcha event and Piranha Rush. I am also responsible for the testing tasks related to in-game ads, which is a significant revenue source for the company! 💰
A huge part of the QA role here is having effective communication with the design and development teams from as early on in the process as possible. This helps to ensure that we help the team avoid having big problems later on!
💪 Sense of responsibility
The best thing about our team is that it is made out of exceptionally talented individuals from super diverse backgrounds. Our office culture is marked by trust, flat hierarchies and open communication. This has created a great environment for addressing critical issues. I’m genuinely impressed by the strong sense of responsibility shown by my team members, and I really appreciate that everyone is always ready to extend a helping hand during challenging moments.
📚 The keys to success
I believe that QA game testers should embody several key qualities, but the most important ones are:
👉 Robust analytical skills
👉 Effective communication and strong team collaboration
👉 Patience and an eye for detail to navigate through repetitive tasks
👉 A curious mindset for exploring various scenarios
👉 A good understanding of end-users, which helps to understand how players might engage with the game
👉 And lastly, in a QA role you’re often faced with tight deadlines, so it is key to manage time efficiently and prioritize tasks well ⏲️