Level Design in Games: Tips and Best Practices

Level design is the critical process of constructing playable spaces and experiences for video games. It involves extensive planning, modeling, and iteration to craft visually striking environments, guide, and immerse players, provide the right pacing of challenges, and support overall gameplay and narrative goals. The work of a skilled level designer makes or breaks players’ enjoyment.

What Is Level Design

Level design is a game development process that encompasses numerous responsibilities, including conceptualizing spaces, mapping out layouts, decorating environments, placing interactive elements, lighting, visual effects, optimization, and playtesting. In their work, level designers must consider architecture, spatial design, psychology, graphics, user experience, and game design principles.

The goal is to produce 3D spaces that guide players on an enjoyable journey as they pursue objectives by overcoming challenges of increasing difficulty. Battles, puzzles, and meaningful narrative elements punctuate this journey. Environments also need to support core gameplay mechanics like player abilities. The best levels created by professional designers from a video game development company achieve the illusion of believable, lived-in spaces that engage players on a deeper level.

The Development Of Level Design In Games

Due to hardware limitations, early 2D arcade games had flat, side-scrolling video game levels with simple repeating patterns. Home console games also relied on abstraction and repetition, though some games incorporated basic parallax scrolling to add some depth. Early 1990s 3D level design in games experimented with explorable 3D environments but was still quite basic.

As gaming computation power and capabilities grew exponentially, level design also advanced hugely in complexity over time. Dedicated level design teams became standard for big projects. Modern high-budget level design in games can create vast open worlds or intricately crafted linear levels full of detail and interactivity. Complex lighting, physics systems, dynamic/destructible elements, and terrain generation tools give designers incredible freedom, limited mainly by their creativity.

Trends like photorealistic VR environments and AI-assisted design will lead to bigger, more immersive, and reactive spaces modelled closely on the real world. Level designers will need strong 3D modeling for arranging spaces, hard surface modeling for assets, and architecture for level game design. Knowledge of architecture, transportation design, product design, special effects, animation, visual arts, game writing, and psychology will serve them well.

Stages of Level Game Design

Crafting a highly polished game-level design that fits seamlessly into broader gameplay can have multiple stages. Before jumping into specific steps, it is critical to align on high-level goals, target experiences and technical realities. Developing a shared creative vision across stakeholders ensures everyone pulls in the same direction through the complex creative process from concepts to final polished builds. 

Understanding Constraints

Defining limitations and targets early on sets the foundation for achievable video game-level design consistent with overall game direction. Common elements to identify upfront include:

• Target hardware specs and performance budget – affects things like polygon counts, draw calls, lighting limits, etc
• Established and planned mechanics and player abilities to design around
• Number and combinations of players/enemies/NPCs to accommodate
• Intended overall difficulty curve and challenge pacing
• Artistic themes and style guides – realism, stylized, etc

Documenting this clearly helps visualize the design envelope so teams understand the inherent guardrails guiding creativity. It also helps benchmark progress once blocking out begins. For example, playtests of level-design video games can quickly reveal designs exceeding established polygon budgets, prompting optimizations.

Generate Concepts and Establish a Framework

With limitations understood, high-level aims can be defined, e.g., “lava-filled industrial maze with platforming challenges.” Concept art and references help establish the intended look and feel. Bubble charts are abstract representations, with bubbles as major gameplay spaces connected by player flow arrows, allowing experimentation with video game-level structure early on.

Bubble Charts

Bubble charts help quickly visualize and iterate overall pacing and progression without initially getting bogged down in details. Bubbles could represent enemy encounters, narrative moments, and hidden areas. Arranging and connecting these high-level spaces experiments with the flow before literal layouts.

For example, this diagram perfectly shows how the game guides the player through the story by placing powerful enemies. According to the data, 75.8% of respondents stated that difficult enemies shaped their gameplay path.

Quickly ideate game-level design structure by placing bubbles representing key zones like combat, parkour, puzzle spaces, etc., and connecting them with player flow arrows. Allows experimentation with:

• Pacing – Are intense areas spaced for relief?
• Variety – Does the player experience shift across sections?
• Hidden branches – Are there secrets to reward exploration?

Bubble charting guides layouts at a high level without wasting effort detailing too early. Rapid iteration creates frameworks matching the desired progression before drilling down. It can quickly suggest flaws in the proposed flow.

However, while encouraging creativity, the lead designer must ensure bubble arrangements ultimately support gameplay with appropriate rise and fall of challenge. Narrative beats also need to align with video game-level sequencing. Bubble charts help define the macro but should not undermine core objectives.

Rough Maps

With basic game-level design structure mapped out, simple blockout greybox maps are built using primitive 3D shapes for rooms and corridors to indicate overall scale and geometry. These rough maps are quick to build and revise based on playtesting feedback regarding things like flow and encounter pacing. Visual polish comes later.

Blockout volumes must allow actual gameplay experiments instead of just looking logical from a top-down perspective. Game cameras are not top-down. The team must playtest greyboxes extensively before finalizing layouts to improve pacing and conceal surprises effectively.

Completing the Level Design

Once the blockout layout and gameplay flow are greybox approved after sufficient iterations, final artwork and assets can be added, such as quality lighting, textures, props, vegetation, etc., to truly immerse players. Path guides, visual affordances, and wayfinding elements must support navigation so players always have clear directions on where to go next without being distracted.

The devil is in the details – placing enemies, health packs, traps, and other challenges to smooth progression. Hazards should escalate and combine in novel ways while power-ups and player upgrades counter difficulty spikes. Playtesting is absolutely vital to ensure player engagement stays optimal throughout. Many games have dedicated player experience teams that assess video game-level design independently and provide feedback for improvement.

Tips and Best Practices for Crafting game level design

Great-level game design relies on core principles as much as the latest tools and technologies. Keeping certain guidelines in mind during the creative process improves structure, consistency, and engagement regardless of development budget or team size. Establishing these disciplines early also makes course correction faster and easier.

Craft a Game Design Document

Having a frequently updated game design document that serves as a single source of truth allows the entire team – designers, artists, and programmers to stay on the same page regarding high-level aims and constraints. This includes things like:

• General setting, story beats, and level design game sequencing
• Art style – should video game levels feel realistic, stylized 
• Defining player abilities to design around
• Tech limitations like the number of light sources
• Establishing mood, pacing, and intensity targets per level

With clear guidelines, level design video game team members can identify what to put where while retaining creative freedom. It also helps when significant reworks are needed due to playtesting results.

Designing Levels With Clear Goals and Purpose

Well-designed video game levels lead players to keep moving towards clearly communicated end goals by providing a logical path of least resistance. This encourages continuous momentum. Optional branching paths can provide some flexibility, but players should never feel lost or aimless. Consistent visual and mechanical cues subtly guide them through interim objectives serving ultimate aims. If players frequently backtrack to find the next step forward, reassess signposting cues.

Prioritize Genuine Immersion

Believable spaces with reactive elements and consistent internal logic fully engross players. Volumetric lighting, authentic detail, and rich interaction make environments more credible. Destructible game-level design objects like furnishings add to the realism. Seamless transitions between play spaces prevent breaking believability.

However, while visual polish is important, effects should enhance, not hinder, core gameplay. Evaluate whether additions provide real immersive value before resource allocation. Beware of feature creep that affects performance without adding depth.

Player-Friendly Learning

Gradually introducing mechanics in safe, low-pressure contexts builds mastery, training player reflexes and knowledge to tackle future challenges. Organically providing environmental affordances like climbable vines on vertical surfaces or chest-high walls in cover shooters in level-design video games teaches newer mechanics.

Optional hidden paths with additional challenges add depth for invested players without confusing others. Difficulty spikes late in video game levels test mastery. Players feel genuine accomplishment overcoming intense climactic gauntlets, demonstrating their developed skills.

Testing, Feedback, and Continuous Improvement

External and impartial player experience testers across casual and expert groups provide valuable objective feedback. Industry veterans advise assessing early builds without visual distractions to evaluate flow engagement pacing. Remaining open to feedback and refinements, even late ones, meaningfully improves player enjoyment and brand sentiment in the long term.

Many established studios have extensive beta testing processes lasting months, during which entire sections are reworked based on tester feedback and in-game data analytics before final release certification.

Tools and Technologies in Level Design

Major game engines like Unity and Unreal have robust, dedicated toolsets for building fully featured game level design – terrain sculpting, foliage and physics-driven entities, baking lighting, etc. Proprietary engines built specially for franchise titles also exist, like the Decima Engine for Death Stranding. Specialized plugins add advanced capabilities like vegetation distribution, fluid simulation, and destruction modeling.

Key features include:

• Intuitive 3D editing environments for precise placement and alignment of structures, interactive entities, etc
• Terrain sculpting for natural-looking environments, including caves, cliffs and bodies of water
• Prefab libraries with premade assets and modular environment kits for rapid iteration
• Visual scripting tools to trigger events, simulate physics collisions
• Advanced rendering capabilities like volumetric lighting, post-processing stacks

Built-in analysis tools provide optimization insights on aspects like draw calls and lightmap guides to maximize performance. Testing level design game suites allow toggling AI behaviors and spawn rates to balance difficulty.

While functionality continues improving in gaming engines, competency in additional modeling software is still required for creating assets and customizing needs. Video game-level designers should be skilled with leading engines for their target platforms, leveraging available tooling for rapid block out, playtesting, and iteration well before final art polish and effects.

Conclusion

Level design is the craft of constructing immersive 3D game worlds optimized for player engagement through meaningful challenges and mastery. It draws on architecture, environmental design and psychology to guide gamers on memorable journeys, elevating gameplay with believable spaces filled with reactivity.

Great video game-level designers deeply understand player motivation and have both analytical and artistic sensibilities. They harness available tools and emerging trends in gaming computation power, AI and VR to surprise and delight players, keeping them engrossed for hours, discovering new wonders while pursuing clear goals. It is undoubtedly one of gaming’s most multifaceted and vibrant creative fields.