When solo developing action-adventure titles, levels take up the vast majority of the design work.
My process is mostly blocking out in-engine rather than pencil and paper planning. I keep my games playable so that testing can happen on the fly.
Although not strictly within the discipline of Level Design, I make heavy use of modular art. The flexibility to pivot designs or refine them post-art is powerful.
For linear level design I wrote an article on a tried and true process.
I also wrote an article on how I handle in-level scripting:
Here is a sample of my work. Everything but game engine, audio, and music are my own work.
Veil: Alter Unknown – Tutorial
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Veil’s tutorial is a smaller open world: an easy playground to get people started.
Tutorial Areas: The level’s structure is defined around several areas designed to introduce a player ability. Owl statues explain abilities.
Gliding: Gliding is the hardest ability to explain. I give the the player a goal to motivate them to learn with a distant tower and floating island.
Limiting Abilities? Normally, games limit player abilities until instructions hit. I think differently.
From the get-go, players can use ALLLLL their abilities, they just might not know they exist yet. I’m a fan of accidental discovery if they stumble upon it, especially in a game where finding out you can glide is kinda a big deal.
A Star Door: A “star door” blocks the level’s exit. It requires a number of star collectibles to open. it’s placed front and center so players find it naturally. It serves a few purposes:
- Stars are scattered throughout level, so it forces players to receive all instructions on how to play game.
- Star doors act as the objective of most levels, being the entrance to the next, so I want players to know they exist and stars are valuable.
Gravity Cave: Once players learn the game’s move set in a calm environment, they will open the star door. At this stage they need something exciting.
Inside I reward them with a cool moment where they fly through gravity caverns. Story-wise, this introduces the otherworldly-ness of this alternate dimension they are in.
Hall of Hands: After the Gravity Cave players are met with another strange sight: a large room with rocky hands coming out of the walls. This room is a hint that this world has an eerie truth lying underneath. A mystery has no wonder without dropping hints.
Veil: Alter Unknown – Spes Intera
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Spes Intera is one of Veil’s many linear levels that act as a challenging platforming gauntlet to mix up the exploration-focused open levels.
Levels like it are not meant only for the challenge, they also offer a chance to wow players with a surreal new backdrop: Each linear level takes place in a different dimension.
“The Level is Too Long” Testers were telling me the level ran too long, when in reality it only takes ~7 minutes to complete. I sensed this wasn’t feedback to take at face value.
My theory was the level had too many “high octane” segments one after another, and without rest I was wearing players out. To fix this I blocked in several easy parts that take a sec to run through, dispersing them throughout level.
After the change, testers stopped bringing up length and only had fun, so I think it worked.
A large plateau with field of bumps to run over:
A “forest” of platforms:
Handling the Awe Factor: The level has a sense of grand scale. This emotion must be handled right for payoff. Slam cool imagery in people’s faces non-stop and it loses meaning, even becoming annoying.
I start the player off in a simple hallway with no obstacles, walk them into the area proper with a covered bridge to ease in the awe, then cue in the magical music.
The hallways. I like to play with lighting where glow happens in models:
The covered bridge. Exits rock formation hallways are placed in:
What the view looks like from bridge:
Momentum: For this level I tried to string together obstacles so that speed carries over nicely to the next one. Turns out this is when my gameplay is at it’s strongest, so I emulate this in other linear level designs.
A Shift in Music: Hard to show, but the level starts with pretty, calming music. About one third through, more upbeat music starts to sell that your now knee-deep in this crazy parkour world.
Blockouts
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A sample of my work mid-development!
In addition to gameplay, I like to work out aesthetics in my work before final art is created. Color and composition are the focus, not detail.
In Veil: Alter Unknown, oftentimes I don’t know what a level will look like until the blockout happens. Spontaneous, strange ideas are the name of the game for a surreal interdimensional world.
Blockouts from Veil: Alter Unknown:
A scrapped open world level for an early iteration of Castle on the Coast:
Concept Art
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Yes, I do concept art too when given the chance!
I utilize screenshots of my blockouts for concepting, drawing on top to plan out the final artwork.
I like doing this post-blockout, as I don’t have much luck trying to conform gameplay around specified visuals. Perspective being solved is a nice bonus.
Peter Lantz 