Level design 101: the language of location development
We’ll delve into the historical origins of the level design profession, the various related roles, understand what level designers contribute, and outline some basic approaches to level design.
Hello! My name is Vasiliy Skobelev, and I’m a Lead Level Designer at Pixonic, MY.GAMES. Once upon a time, someone defined game design as “motivating the player to take certain actions.” That’s a good description. To paraphrase that idea a bit, I would describe level design as: “Motivating the player to take certain actions via the environment where a player character exists.”
Why did we begin by defining game design, even though the title of this article would suggest I should be moving to establish level design as its own independent niche?
This is for a pretty simple reason: as level designers, our first, and primary task, is to reinforce the mechanics created by game design within the gaming environment; to give the player a chance to play. (By the way, I added this phrase about “a player character” in my level design definition upon hearing repeated disputes about the interface in discussions on level design. Let’s forget about that during this article: after all, the UI almost always exists outside the game environment and isn’t a level designer’s tool.)
Moving on, now that we’ve defined level design, let’s examine its essence.
Where exactly did this niche come from? What results do level designers ultimately produce? This is what we will explore further in this article. In fact, there will be a whole series of articles, where I’ll try to cover the entire foundations of this area of game design — from the very basics, to the techniques used in AAA development.
But before we start looking into how a designer interacts with levels in modern times, let’s dive into the historical origins of level design.
How did level design come about?
There’s this popular belief that level design originated from some notable games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, driven by the efforts of equally notable industry figures like John Romero and Richard Gray. (Actually, they were the level designers on these projects.)
Incidentally, I was once lucky enough to personally meet and talk with Richard Gray, and I found him quite approachable — a far cry from the persona you might expect considering his justified reputation as a sort of heavenly figure who descended down to Earth and formed an entire profession.
A bit more background information: games driven by level design, just like first-person games, and 3D games or pseudo-3D games, existed before 1990–1991, but it was not so convenient or popular. Still, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D managed to attract a wide audience due to the fact that they were about feeling, about action, about momentum.
Another fun fact: actually, both Gray and Romero were originally software engineers; there were no level designers at that time. There were just people who wanted to provide characters with an environment where they could run around and shoot at somebody. These “pre-level-design” software engineers had to do a lot of things: for example, they had to consider, not only the layout of the locations, but also deal with level lighting, design all the gunfights, introduce new mechanics (and they had to be mechanics which players could easily understand without an external guide — and back then, these were printed and quite rare).
Below is a screenshot indicating one feature of old 3D games. Here the enemy character is within a shadow; both light and shadow were not baked at that time, and there were no separate light sources, as engines now have. All this was either drawn directly onto the textures or adjusted with specific brightness parameters per tile. That is, you had individual, lighter and darker modular wall assets depending on the desired light pattern — and all this was implemented by the necessarily versatile engineers like the aforementioned Gray and Romero.
Let’s outline just a few (but not all of) the separate professions that would eventually derive from the work that level designers performed in the early 90s. Imagine, all of the following roles: Level Designer, Lighting Artist, Level Artist, Concept Artist, Environment Artist, Encounter Designer — were formerly performed by just one person.
Let’s briefly examine each.
These days, the role of Level Designer is responsible for how players actually play within a level, instead of the appearance of a level. (However, this separation doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t, for example, work on lighting or bake navigation; all this is still necessary, but only in order for the location to be playable, and to be playable as the designer intended.)
Separately, there is the Level Artist. A Level Artist assembles a location from ready-made assets. That is, they literally dress a blockout in the production ready content.
And Environment Artists produce this content — materials, static meshes, and so on.
At large studios and on large projects, there are also Lighting Artists, who separately configure the lighting, even incorporating artistic and cinematic lighting. By the way, if you want to see an example of fantastic lighting, I highly recommend trying Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Respawn: the lighting is great — just like in the George Lucas films. For example, if you have some kind of a landmark on the horizon, it will have a backlight that will make it contrast against the dark backdrop. And, if we pay attention, we’ll note this backlight won’t necessarily “exist” in the game world. That is, while there may not actually be any lamp or window, light will be added.
There are also Concept Artists. These priceless folks work with ideas and help visualize them.
Concept Artists mainly produce 2D art, which can depict many iterations of ideas for a game, from characters to locations. Their work can be iterated much faster and will be less expensive compared to doing everything with “working” content. Unfortunately, not everyone turns to concept artists, but I personally really like to have one at least nominally present on the project from the outset and working on locations in parallel with the first blockout. (For example, this is how the project I’m currently working on does things. This is a fairly efficient flow. By the time you’re done blocking, you’ll already have plenty of ideas to build on and move on from.)
And there is the Encounter Designer, or “fight designer”, or “boss fight designer”. They primarily specialize in designing fights and combat encounters, and not so much on level design in general. (Actually, they may not be related to level design at all.) A typical task might look like this: “We need a round arena, it should have such and such obstacles: full- height, half-height, because we will have attacks on such and such zones and at such and such heights.” They work deeper with enemies’ AI and sometimes “level sequences” (cutscenes in Unreal Engine).
So, we’ve defined various level design roles and explored the origins of the profession. Next, let’s talk in more detail about what level design is and a Level Designer’s work scope.
Level designer work artifacts
The first (and most important thing) to Level Designers is the design itself — the most valuable thing they can contribute is the design itself, not its implementation in the engine. Sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t played the game, but below you can see an almost complete map of the metroidvania game called Shadow Complex.
Here we can see colors used to mark different level gameplay mechanics. In some places there are demarcations on zones and screens. There are even some parts that are still in-progress (the crossed-out piece of a location in the corner).
If I was working on Shadow Complex, and a designer came to me and showed me this document, I would exhale; the idea behind everything has been worked out pretty well. Having obtained such a document, I would calmly start mechanically implementing this design into the game — without the need to simultaneously design and assemble anything.
There is, of course, another approach: you could take the collections prepared in the project for your location, for example, for the biomes in which the action will take place, place them into a scene and check how it all works out. But I still stick to this old-fashioned approach: don’t skip the “Pen&Paper” design stage.
After a level designer creates the design itself and it’s approved, the next stage is the blockout. This is a playable level prototype. Ideally:
- A blockout can be played according to the rules of the game
- It is clear in terms of the playable area lighting (there are no exceedingly lit areas nor pitch-black shadows)
- The blockout doesn’t have production ready art assets
- It is assembled from primitive geometry that can be quickly iterated (BSP, Pro Builder, etc.)
- It has a clear, understandable navigation and landmarks
- Critical path and side content are clearly defined
I’d like to show you some examples of work from level designers that I especially like; the first is from Alexander Leontiev. This is his portfolio blockout, which he prepared especially for interviews:
This is an ideal example:
- It’s a top-down view — orthogonal projection, where we can evaluate the layout of the location: how obstacles are placed, how the lines are built, the paths a player can take, and so on
- It has a division into separate floors like a “layer cake”
- There are also text descriptions available
The only thing I would add here is key frame shots from the player’s perspective. This is a rather important point — after all, the way the player sees a level can differ quite a bit from what we expect when looking at a location from above or from the side.
Let me show you what I mean; the following are examples of blockouts by a level designer named Amin Montazeri, currently one of the best with publicly available works. Amin often posts the orders he gets for maps and levels.
The illustrations below demonstrate a fairly good, readable color code:
To get more color, he also passed these screenshots through a filter similar to the one in the “Prisma” app:
It’s not necessary to do this, but this is an amazing example of making a location visually understandable so that it’s more comfortable to play, with no overexposed or black places, with clear key objects, and a goal. We can learn a lot from him.
In addition to these, he also shares time-lapses by other designers from the “blockout — final location” category:
Let’s summarize level designer artifacts
- First, the design itself or Pen&Paper, often created (though not necessarily) using conventional pen and paper. The main thing is that it should be thought out without being limited to the engine capabilities, based only on what you want to have in the location.
- Second, the blockout within the engine.
- And third, the accompanying documentation or so called Level Design Document (LDD). Moreover, the documentation process can be greatly simplified in production if you save the materials from the first stage.
Are these really all the stages of a designer’s interaction with a location? Of course not, this diagram doesn’t show the final level that made it into the game, and there’s quite a bit of work between the level design and the final product.
How does this relate to our goals in game production? Let’s take a closer look at this and draw a clear line between level design and the art department, since many confuse or mix these two niches.
The difference between level design and art
What is the difference between level and art? Max Pierce, a level designer who worked on both The Division and Cyberpunk 2077, and who has released a couple of books on design, put this very well in an interview:
It doesn’t need to look beautiful, stunning or anything like that. We make it functional.
One of my favorite examples is Flappy Bird. On the right we see the level design placeholder, and on the left, the art. The difference is quite obvious. (Let’s ignore the fact that it was done by the same person over one morning.)
And now let’s look at some project examples. Above we see the level designers’ work, and below, the work of the level artists.
Grayboxes and whiteboxes
Blockouts can generally be divided into two types: grayboxes and whiteboxes.
Grayboxes consist of level blocking without any art at all — or more specifically, without any of the signature elements that would clearly broadcast that, for instance, this is a house, and this is a rock. This model gives a lot of room for the art department’s imagination to take flight. As you might guess, above Destiny 2 provides us with an example of a graybox. That is, the most abstract block that serves to quickly and efficiently change the layout of the location as needed. Of course, spatial thinking skills are required for people who will further work with this. If you want to change locations efficiently in terms of time and resources, you will have to do it on grayboxes.
There are also whiteboxes. There are projects where whiteboxes are requested right away, and there are those where a whitebox is implemented as a subsequent step. This consists of blocking with key art — and even if there are no art assets, there is at least a silhouette that tells us something about a place we are playing in.
For example, in the case of Uncharted above, there are no art assets, but the level designer has already created a tree, a tunnel, and made the water flow like a waterfall. Everything is pretty clear. Looking over such a blockout, I would have no questions regarding the environment and the events happening within it.
A whitebox with art assets is seen in the Call of Duty example. There are already wagons, arches, and these aren’t going to change much during the art pass stage. (But passes and, in general, pipelines of interaction between different departments, are a completely different story, which we will talk about next time.)
Conclusion
In this article, we started by covering some of the most important and fundamental things in the world of level design, concepts still confused by both job candidates and employers. Since we managed to sort out things like the origins of the profession, the artifacts received from the level designer, and the difference in approaches to the level production, we’re now on the same page. By the way, the terminology above hasn’t been pulled out of thin air, and is used by some large and respected studios as well as by my fellow level designers around the world.
In the upcoming articles, we’ll delve into even more interesting aspects of the level design profession. We’ll consider basic design principles with examples, then move on to less obvious techniques, including those that originated from movie production, and share a couple of tips on this topic.
→ Follow the breadcrumbs: the basic techniques of level design
