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In architecture, the parti is the central idea / concept of a project. Can you reduce the building down to its most important structural aspects in 1 sentence?

Similarly, level design benefits from defining a central core idea that anchors the rest of the design. If you're able to pitch your level with a clear parti statement or sketch, then your collaborators (or even the player) will understand your intent better.

Parti in architecture

Price Tower, "The Tree that Escaped the Crowded Forest"

What is navigation?

Steering vs pathfinding

Steering

Obstacle avoidance

Flocking

Formations

Pathfinding

basics of A star

Node graph

but also AI hinting, cover

Navmesh

How to prep navigation for a level

Debug tools (show destination, add AI follow debug)

recast or grid, vs manual markup

basic combat AI considerations

Read David Sirlin's collectibles article about Donkey Kong Country

Draw a 2D platformer layout with collectibles

For specific setpieces, markup the outline of the player's screen; what can the player see exactly

Present and talk through the plan

For this design test, you will adapt a real-world building or location into a single player level.

Focus on these design considerations:

• Typology: what are the main structural patterns of the real world site, and how can this logic be simplified while still maintaining a strong resemblance?

• Massing: what parts feel light or heavy, thin or thick, strong or delicate, and how do we distil those qualities into a 3D recreation?

Introduction

This is a design exercise for drawing a simple level layout.

Design brief... 5 minute single player level about unlocking a door and leaving, include a good layout and a bad layout

D6 lighting uses the six faces of an ordinary six-sided game die (1d6) (⚀ ⚁ ⚂ ⚃ ⚄ ⚅) to help you remember different lighting strategies.

This strategy is about lighting for flow, not just lighting from a specific view or camera perspective. It represents a more architectural and spatial approach to lighting a level, and in most cases, we encourage you to prioritize this type of lighting theory over three point lighting.

⚀ 1. Focal point

Place a lone light source to emphasize a specific point or place, to suggest the player approach this exact location.

A point light treats all angles equally, while the directionality of a spotlight suggests more of a specific angle of approach or intention. Imagine a lone window, campfire, car headlights, flood light, a dramatic lone stage light angled down.

⚁ 2. Focal frame

Place two similar light sources next to each other to frame something in the space between. It will suggest an approach that is perpendicular to the frame.

Frame an entrance or exit. Torches, sconces.

⚂ 3. Path / boundary

Angle spotlights toward a wall to "wash" the surface evenly

⚃ 4. Space

⚄ 5. Space with focal point

⚅ 6. Space with framed path

vertical massing, height, "z-levels", floors

Of course, it is difficult to plan in the vertical dimension with a top-down layout drawing. That's why architects draw elevations and sections to depict the vertical profile of a building. But for level design planning purposes, that is too much detail. Think more abstract.

(layout with verticality)

• Group your areas into major ground planes / elevations, and shade it like a heightmap: darker areas are lower, while lighter areas are higher.

• Omit any minor height changes or shallow terrain sloping.

• Reserve enough space for ramps, stairs, and any approaches or landings.

If your map consists of overlapping floors over floors, draw the floors separately and label the transitions between floors. But for structures with trivial ground floors, like a watchtower, then you can simply omit it. Draw what will best communicate the core ideas of the level.

To build up lighting skills, start as simple as possible: ignore all the fancy lighting features of your game engine or renderer, and instead manually hand-place every light source, including any bounce lights or fill lights. This is a labor-intensive "old fashioned" way of lighting a 3D space, but it is a useful exercise to force you to think about what your light is doing. This workflow is also more relevant than you may think; relatively recent games like Fallout 4 feature no precomputed light baking.

Light a simple blockout room with realtime direct lights and hand-placed indirect lighting.

If this is your first time thinking about lighting, texture the blockout with grayscale textures and use desaturated grayscale lighting.

If you'd like more of a challenge, use colored prototyping textures and colored lights.

Disable precomputed light baking, use only realtime lights, consult the lighting page on how to setup a fill light

Early 20th century modernist architects debated: what is the soul of a building?

The architect Louis Sullivan famously argued in an article "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" (1896) that a boxy featureless industrial office building had its own beauty that was timeless and universal -- that "form follows function."

So this is one (outdated) way to understand environment art: extra details and ornament, form WITHOUT function.

For more on modernist architects being wrong, see History of architecture.

(TODO: compare art nouveau vs. modernist architecture image)

More directly, env art has roots in two crafts: model miniatures and film set construction.

People used to play with physical doll houses, model trains, and Warhammer battles. You had to assemble and paint the pieces yourself, but that construction and customization was part of the fun. It must be beautiful, but it must also be usable for play.

The film industry used to build physical film sets / FX with matte paintings and prop design. Some env art terminology (like "hero prop") even comes from the film industry. Many artists have worked in both film and games, and these industries / traditions converge more every day.

(TODO: train miniatures, film set miniatures, etc.)

TODO: summarize Learning From Las Vegas

What's a player persona?

A player persona is a player's long term pattern of behavior and overall motivation for playing a game.

Classifying players under various personas / categories can help you study players and interpret playtest data.

In reality, players are never just one category. People are a complex combination of all these motivations and more.

Nonetheless, this reductive simplicity can be useful for making design decisions and imagining your audience. Ideally, every level can satisfy every persona.

(TODO: flesh this out a lot more)

Play style vs player persona

Huizinga's game of politics

• Player

• Cheater

• Spoil-Sport

Bartle's "gamer psychology"

The 1996 was one of the earliest attempts to classify video game players. Bartle was studying player behavior in early text-based MMOs called , and sorted all these MUD players into four general categories:

• achievers want to score the most points, maximize game progress

• explorers want to discover new places or systems, map-out the game space

• killers focus on PvP / competitive conflict with other players, sometimes unfairly

(TODO: include 4 quadrant matrix image)

On this page, we list various level design project plans / assignments. These are useful for teachers to plan lessons, but also useful for anyone seeking to learn and practice level design by themselves too.

However, we do have some almost-finished project plans to give you a sense of what we're going for:

• , make (and think about) Doom / Quake level design with classic arcade-style shooter combat.

Scope is the general size and complexity of a project.

In , you set the initial scope and expectations.

The conventional wisdom in game development is to assume every project begins massively overscoped. Even small reasonable projects hide secret problems. Level design is no different; even a small level may require many iterations and playtests to prove out, if ever. When in doubt, scope down and cut unnecessary non-pillar game aspects.

With more work experience (or in a group, more trust) you eventually become slightly better at estimating project scope. If you're new to game dev, we suggest a 50% rule: imagine the smallest possible project you can... and then mercilessly cut -50% of the scope, for a +50% chance of actually finishing it.

In level design, a gate is anything that blocks player , usually along a .

Gating is an abstract concept, it is not necessarily a literal gate or door. It could be a magic barrier, an NPC blocking a doorway until you complete their quest, or an avalanche of rocks that falls behind the player. Anything that blocks player movement is functioning as a gate.

Gating is also a verb: "we have to gate the player inside the arena until they complete the boss fight..."

Gate types

TODO: summarize some bits from Why Buildings Stand Up

Game example:

Video games are always changing. This means that level design is also always changing. The "Culture" section of this book seeks to understand patterns and trends in level design:

• What does "level design" mean to different people?

• How do other disciplines and industries relate to level design?

• What are other ways to think about level design, beyond a "craft" lens?

In a case study, an author conducts an analysis of a playable level or location.

A good case study identifies design strengths and weaknesses, considers typical player behavior, and compares it to other levels and games. These critical design essays demonstrate how to apply a lot of concepts from the section of this book.

For more on our recommended methodology, see .

When lighting scenes for night or shadowy low light conditions, game developers generally follow the film industry convention ("Hollywood Darkness"): make it feel dark, but don't actually make it dark.

Early filmmakers shot their night scenes with a "day-for-night" technique: film in the early morning and artificially darken the image with a blue filter. Today, artificial lighting and better cameras mean contemporary filmmakers can shoot "night-for-night" scenes too. Some cinematographers (e.g. Steve Yedlin for Knives Out (2019)) even combine both techniques, compositing day-for-night and night-for-night shots together to create an impressionistic look.

If we light our level "accurately" with pitch-black darkness, then players can't see where to go and become frustrated.

This page builds on terms and concepts from the main Lighting page.

General night setup

In real-life, moonlight is white (reflected light from the sun)... In film and games, moonlight is blue-ish. Full moon will cast stark projected shadows, cloudy evenings will cast few shadows

Fill lights = dim subtle blueish point lights with no shadows and soft falloff

Don't apply flat ambient to all shadows; you want SOME shadows to terminate into 0% black, or else you're not using the full dynamic range. Use directional ambient

Remember: don't rely on dark albedo textures to darken the scene! Let the lights create the sense of darkness. If you burn shadows into your textures, your textures will be less reusable and harder to relight, and you will force your lighting into overbright ranges to compensate.

Rim lighting to emphasize silhouettes while leaving most of the subject in shadow

With so much reliance on blue, blorange is common, but try to avoid vanilla blorange by introducing a third color or tweak hue ranges

In the image above from Overwatch 2, note the brightness, contrast, and color palette in the night time lighting scenario (bottom-right). What makes a night scene feel like a night scene?

• it's actually pretty bright; what makes it feel dark is increased contrast and specular

• characters are darker silhouettes vs. brighter horizon

• it's not just boring blorange; there's a lot of purple and yellow mixed in

Shadow design

Against "Hollywood darkness" in games

Lighting your game in a "Hollywood darkness" style results in a more polished commercial feel that matches popular mainstream visual culture.

As in film, some artists purposely want to avoid this style and its implications. If that type of mood isn't appropriate for your project's experience goals (i.e. you want to make something disconcerting, confusing, jarring, visually experimental) then you may wish to disregard much of the advice on this page.

Lighting as mechanic

Games with heavy use of dynamic lighting and flashlights, especially horror games, may want to selectively let high tension scenes go to pitch black darkness.

Sources / Further Reading

• is a great 15 minute introduction to lighting and production design for night scenes by cinematographer Valentina Vee. Although she focuses on film industry techniques, much of her visual thinking is applicable to games.

• "" is a 4-part 3.5 hour video series where environment artist (Crysis, Overwatch) lights a Portuguese street scene at night with extensive commentary. Much of his workflow is specific to Source 2's Hammer tool, but the general thinking is applicable to any tool or engine.

Why tell a story with level design?

Many players enjoy video games for the narrative aspects. It is engaging to explore a virtual space and to meet its virtual inhabitants, and to witness how the player's actions affect the fictional game world in small or big ways. Commercial action and roleplaying games tend to emphasize the world design as a thematic "skin" to decorate levels, while walking simulators elevate these storytelling aspects above all else. Every project will emphasize environmental narratives to a different extent, based on their core pillars and design goals.

Narrative design is obviously a large complex topic that merits its own book. So here we will focus on the storytelling work that specifically level designers, environment artists, and scripters do:

• is the overall plot / sequence of events in the level.

• is the conceptual design of the level's setting.

• Environmental storytelling

• Choreography

Environmental storytelling

In level design, environmental storytelling is about building a level to convey or imply a past event.

While worldbuilding is concerned with the entire fictional game world at a huge zoomed-out scope, environmental storytelling focuses on individual rooms in a more granular zoomed-in sense. What happened here, in this specific room with these specific characters?

Example: Gone Home, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Choreography

Environmental storytelling is useful for conveying past events or static backstory in a game, but cannot portray current events in the present time. We need a different tool: choreography is a form of game narrative where in-game actors move / change in front of the camera. When a character walks and talks, a car crashes through a wall, or a monster growls from the shadows -- that's a scripted sequence, usually choreographed from a tool separate from the main level editor.

Example: Half-Life 1 scripted sequence entities, Half-Life 2 FacePoser tool, Telltale chore tool, Witcher 3 choreo tool, Unity and Unreal

Plot-shaped level design

In a broader sense, everything in the game should serve as narrative. Gameplay and puzzles are part of the narrative too. To tell an effective game story, narrative designer tying story tightly to a :

Your job is to make it as hard as possible for the player to finish your game without understanding your story. [...]

This means that the player must encounter, and ideally make use of, every critical piece of information in the story. “Encounter” might mean “read on screen” or “hear in dialogue” or “see in a cut scene,” but encountering information is much less valuable in an interactive context than using information. So it’s best if the player needs to act on each of those critical beats.

To design for this, start by identifying critical beats. What are the facts the reader has to know in order to understand this story?

This is a subset, probably a very small subset, of all the facts the reader could know. Many world-building details and secondary character motivations can probably be omitted without ruining the experience. But if your story’s impact depends on the player learning the protagonist’s secret motives, then that information is vital. [...]

Figure out which information is vital. Make a list. Be honest with yourself and keep the list as short as possible. [...]

Once you have your list of vital data, figure out dependencies. Which facts depend on other facts to make sense? Which facts have the greatest impact if they come after other facts? If learning the protagonist’s secret motive is more effective after we see them commit a crime, that provides a motivation for ordering. Turn your list into a dependency chart.

-- Emily Short, , 18 May 2016

To review

Now what?

• Narrative design for levels ideally begins in , when conceptualizing the project's core . In , storytelling relies on a combination of , , and .

• Try an environmental storytelling exercise.

Three point lighting is lighting design theory used in film, theater, and photography, with three different types of lights:

(1) Key light is the main dominant light source that illuminates most of the subject or area. In most levels, this is usually a directional light (sunlight) or a bright powerful spotlight with high falloff constant (like a floodlight). Task light.

(2) Fill light brightens darker areas to avoid plunging everything into shadow. To fill a game level, we usually use ambient light and (many) invisible soft dim point lights floating in the middle of the room, but wide-angled dim spotlights are also useful when you want to direct the fill and, for example, avoid any fill splashing onto the ceiling. Ambient light, wash.

(3) Rim light highlights edges to pop the foreground from the background. Accent light.

(And in portrait photography, sometimes a fourth background light brightens up the backdrop to smooth out awkward shadows from the key and fill.)

Notice how the key light and fill light in this example are roughly perpendicular to each other, while the rim/back light is behind the subject. Pay special attention to the light positions and directions! The light source placement, relative to other lights, determines their function.

However, the big problem with using three point for games is that it assumes you have complete control over the camera. What if the player controls the camera?

Three point light types depend on the light's orientation relative to the camera -- a rim light is a rim light because it grazes the subject, but if you approach from a different angle, now there's no more rimming action -- now the rim light is a key light! If it looks like a dim shadowy silhouette from the front, it'll glow like a deer in headlights from the back. The light placement matters, but the camera placement matters too.

So in order to use three point theory effectively in games with free movement and a free camera, you need to predict how the player will utilize both.

In a first person game, that means knowing roughly where the player will be walking and looking. Fortunately, we already have a tool to constrain the player's movement and rotation: it's your level layout! If you frame a subject a certain way, or limit an approach to a certain direction, then you can place lights for that perspective. Your is a lighting tool.

Cinematic lighting

The most common use of three point lighting in games is for lighting characters in cinematics / cutscenes. Because you have more camera control in a cutscene, you should draw upon more filmic lighting techniques -- because you're basically making a movie.

TODO: summarize text from these cinematic lighting cheat sheets by Derek L. Brand, senior concept artist on Psychonauts 2 at Double Fine

Introduction

In this project, you'll research, pitch, and prototype a combat encounter for a modern commercial stealth action game, with cover systems and combat fallbacks.

1. Research

Review stealth in Splinter Cell: Blacklist (10-60 min)

Ideally, you've played a recent stealth action game already. If you have never played any of these games, you should go play one now before continuing. At the very least, play past the tutorial level and the first mission, which will likely take at least an hour.

If you are already familiar with the genre, then take some time to review how the game plays. Search for "splinter cell blacklist gameplay" on YouTube and watch at least 10 minutes of game footage.

While you watch the video, reflect on these questions:

• How do most stealth encounters in Blacklist begin? How does the player track enemy movement?

• How long does the stealth encounter last? Does it feel like a small sneak or a big sneak, and why?

• Are there any "beats" to the stealth encounter? What is the pacing and the fantasy?

• How do the stealth encounters end? How does the player know when it's over? How does the player feel at the end and why? How does the player know what the next activity is?

Watch this developer talk about Splinter Cell: Blacklist's AI (30 min)

Next, watch this GDC 2014 talk about Splinter Cell's stealth AI and encounter design tools. Feel free to take notes, and refer to the for reference.

Every game manages its stealth AI differently, but Splinter Cell's core approach is similar enough to other stealth action games that it represents current industry practice. An encounter designer must understand game systems as well as AI tools.

Research questions (15 min)

• Contrast combat AI design vs. stealth AI design. What is the purpose of a "good" stealth AI? What type of experience should it push? What information does it track, and what information does it broadcast to the player?

• Walsh uses "perception" and "awareness" interchangeably. Why? What is the difference, if any, between these two concepts?

Shape psychology and color psychology are theories that shapes / colors convey universal ideas and influence behavior.

Supposedly, circles symbolize infinity, horizontal lines make you feel more stable, squares symbolize balance (but triangles symbolize stability!!) and apparently a drawing of a leaf makes you feel warm. Or something.

Listen, this is like astrology. It's fun to think about. If it makes you happier, go for it.

But don't take it too seriously, and don't try to elevate it to a science. Because if you try to push shape and color psychology as coherent design theory, it quickly falls apart to any scrutiny.

Meaning isn't universal

Abstract geometric shapes and colors, by themselves, do not make all humans feel the same thing nor communicate the same ideas.

For example, let's evaluate a common color psychology claim that "red subconsciously evokes danger," maybe because blood is red and red signals and red stop signs and video games flash red when you have low health. Sounds convincing... But is this still the case in China, quite possibly the largest consumer market for video games in the world, where red often signifies good luck, fortune, prosperity, and joy? And what exactly does red convey to the 8% of European men who have red-green color blindness? When farmers paint a barn red, are they trying to convey danger or intensity?

Shape and color are abstract phenomena that do not have universal meanings for everyone around the world. Instead, shapes and colors mean many different things in different situations, and this meaning depends heavily on personal context and audience.

Meaning is contextual

"Horizontal lines convey stability"... until we see a fast flowing river strewn with wreckage.

"S-curves feel harmonious"... unless you're speeding in a car and you have to hit the brakes to avoid careening off an unexpected S-curve road.

It is easy to imagine many situations where blanket statements about shapes or colors don't work. At worst, all these blanket statements just feel blanket wrong. At best, it vastly oversimplifies how art creates meaning.

Meaning is cultural and learned

Imagine you're playing Fortnite and you see a green-colored item, indicating that it is "uncommon" tier. Does the color green scream "uncommon" to you? What about a purple-colored "Epic" item, did the designers use purple because that color inherently conveys rarity or epicness? And yet, a "Legendary" tier item is orange... does orange universally feel more valuable than purple? How do we reconcile these colors and meanings?

The answer is: we don't care about the specific colors and their connotations, because we know the specific color doesn't matter.

These color coding patterns have evolved as loot games like Destiny and Diablo implemented their own item tier systems. Colors in games mean things because of genre convention. If the color meanings feel consistent and natural, then it is more because you're immersed in a specific subset of gamer culture, not because colors have universal intrinsic meanings across all humanity.

Games have their own psychology

And even if it wasn't bullshit, shape and color psychology would not necessarily transfer to a video game context.

People often behave one way in the real world, but behave differently in a video game. Player behavior depends more on game patterns, mechanics, available information, cultural framing, and roleplaying persona, rather than whether a shape is round or square.

"Pointy things are bad!"... until you need to collect pointy-shaped crystals to craft a valuable item.

"Round shapes feel safe"... until you add a dangerous enemy to your game that is round.

Game systems, and the player's knowledge of them, override whatever "natural" or "subconscious" meanings from the outside world.

You're better off without it

For this reason, we argue that shape / color psychology doesn't address how players play games.

Maybe give humans a little bit more credit? No one sees a circle and thinks "wow I love that circle, I'm going to walk toward that circle now."

Some artists might argue that color psychology / shape psychology isn't supposed to be taken literally, or that these theories have value as simplistic guidelines to trick beginners into thinking about . To which we respond: let's make some better guidelines.

Let shape and color psychology remain as they are: convenient snake oil for fake SEO marketing blogs and consultants.

See also

• is about the science of color palettes. It is not the same thing as color psychology, because (1) it's actually real, and (2) it makes smaller claims about how colors work.

• is the study of signs, and it's really complicated.

complete some of the projects in the Projects category

find a web host

if you can afford it, register your own domain

don't use wix... a free wordpress is probably better

if your portfolio is visually oriented, just make an artstation

flatten the web template

say what you are at the top

remove all the crap from the web template, delete everything except the home page

create project pages

don't write too much

include 3-5 screenshots and a short video, and links to external websites and reviews

test on mobile

imagine you're a bored manager scrolling through your e-mails

(optional) get a twitter, use it at least once a week

show that you are following industry discourse and industry figures

helps you pretend you know people, helps you memorize names

upload a CV

1 page at most, less text is almost always better

include your name, portfolio URL, and desired dev role

don't put your GPA or your minor, but list any big awards, grants, scholarships

don't pad your "skills and interests" section, imagine reading 40 of these and it won't seem as cute

omit your home address or phone number, you're putting this on the internet

include a PDF in case they want to save and download it, etc

your CV has two functions: (1) list your work experience and qualifications, and (2) give your interviewer stuff to ask you about... don't bore them

update your portfolio regularly

after every project / before you apply

example level design portfolios

• Anthony Panecasio:

• Magnar Jenssen:

The Level Design Book is a free nonprofit project run by volunteers.

About this book

Level design is a bit of a dying art. Modern industrial workflows and the popularity of procedurally generated content mean that level design, as traditionally understood in the 1990s, feels increasingly less relevant to contemporary game genres and trends.

And yet, many games (and companies) still need level designers -- and today's beginner level designers don't have any good learning resources to use.

The past generation of level designers came of age in the 1990s / 2000s, benefiting immensely from the unique bespoke online level design communities of Web 1.5 -- easily sharing and building knowledge with peers. Today, all that knowledge is much less accessible and discoverable. The entire internet has been commodified into a handful of all-purpose social media networks, and search engines have generally become much worse / less helpful.

What is a level

A level is a space where a game happens. Some examples:

• the Fortnite island, an obstacle course ("obby") in Roblox

• a basketball court, race track, or playground

• a Monopoly board, crossword puzzle, coloring book

All these game spaces set boundaries for players to move and interact.

Different levels offer variation. For example all basketball courts have similar shapes, but an outdoor court and an indoor gym offer different experiences, cultures, and moods.

Level designers focus on how different game spaces can make players feel and behave.

What is level design

We define level design broadly, but with a specific disclaimer:

Level design is the practice of planning and building spaces for video games...

... usually first-person or third-person action shooters.

This book is still useful for sidescrolling platformers, top-down strategy games, or non-combat games. But for better or worse, most level design theory engages with 3D shooters as the default medium, dating back to the invention of the level designer role during the shooter-heavy 1990s.

For more about the history of the level designer role, see .

Functional level design vs. environment art

Level designers focus on shaping player behavior. In large studios, they often write documentation, draft , build , observe , and maps and .

In contrast, an environment artist focuses more on graphics. They models, materials, set dressing, and to refine the level's visual appearance. While this is mostly decoration, good environment art supports experience design goals and helps players play.

So there are two ways to understand level design:

• formal industrial sense of capital-L capital-D "Level Design" without environment art

• broad common sense "level design" includes environment art / anything in a level

In this book we emphasize the formal industrial "Level Design" for learning purposes, but always remember that your players engage with broad common sense "level design" as a whole.

Room design vs. world design

Level designers can spend days or even weeks designing a single room.

But for a huge battle royale, open world, or MMO with hundreds / thousands of rooms, agonizing over a single room is impractical. A world designer considers and for neighborhoods instead of houses, biomes instead of places, categories instead of instances. This generic approach lets players and systems breathe. But without players or systems to fill that void, the resulting world may feel empty or bland.

To build a directed or scripted experience, obsess over every room like an architect.

But for player-heavy system-heavy games with lots of space, world design offers the lighter touch of an urban planner.

Theory vs. "go map"

This is a book, so obviously we think reading is good.

But as with any other art, a book can only introduce you to the craft. At some point you just have to close the book and go build some levels.

If you ask a Quake community mapper a lot of questions, there is a tradition to respond with the blunt answer: "go map." This curt expression might seem rude but it intends to nurture -- as if to say, "stop procrastinating, you'll figure it out; now go try to do it, you're ready."

The only way to become a level designer... is to make levels. Ideally, a lot of levels.

Don't know what to make? See our list of suggested .

Philosophy

This book was written with specific ideals and beliefs about level design.

Cleaner theory

Most level design books are either too academic and conceptual, or too commercial and reductive. We aim to explain and expand the same language that working level designers use, while also remaining critical enough to prune lazy thinking.

Level designers often lack language for discussing shape and volume, and benefit greatly from the architectural concept of . We cite outside concepts without realizing the deeper roots; for example, come from critical path method, a scoping and dependency-checking tool in engineering. When we're imprecise with words and theory, thinking and communication suffers.

Zooming out

Although level designers should focus on player behavior, sometimes we must zoom out and see the big picture.

A level is a combination of spatial design, art, psychology, programming, and culture. From the player's perspective, there is no difference between level design and environment art. Anything that affects the game world is level design.

Avoid the lure of simplistic dos-and-don'ts. Levels are more than collections of rooms and cover boxes, and more than landscapes with rocks and trees sprinkled on top. A level possesses history and culture and intent, and as responsible designers we must consider the entire play experience.

Stay alive and free

The printed format tends to doom level design books to obsolescence within a few years. Fortunately, this book lives online. For the foreseeable future, we intend to continue updating the book as new developments or trends in level design emerge. Don't die.

This online book will stay free and open access until its servers shutdown -- and even then, its content will likely be archived across the internet. The level design community collectively made level design, and so it should continue to belong freely to the community. We will never paywall this book nor sell any copies of this book.

Unattributed book text (and unattributed images / content) are under a permissive Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. You cannot sell this book nor sell any ports / translations. All copies, translations, and derivative works must remain free and open access.

How to use this book

The book consists of four sections:

details core level design concepts, and it is essential for beginners and students who need to learn level design workflows and language. Most readers should start here.

covers level design trends from various perspectives, and offers short primers on the history of architecture, lighting, and other crafts adjacent to level design.

analyze and unpack how a particular level works, accompanied by diagrams and screenshots.

are self-guided tutorials and project ideas for students and hobbyists. Teachers should check .

There's also an appendix, featuring a list with recommended software and game engines, and links to additional level design (free models and textures, recommendations for other level design books, etc.) Lastly, we strongly recommend joining a level design , because a book can't love you back.

Now what?

• Beginners: get a general understanding of the , especially , , and . Then pick a , join a level design , and go map.

• Somewhat experienced: read about specific topics such as , , , , , and that usually go neglected in most online level design tutorials.

When doing a or , you might use a modular kit -- a 3D tileset of modules, meshes designed to snap together. This comes from the real-life building practice of .

If you're new to 3D modeling or level design, then don't attempt to design your own kit yet. Many considerations go into designing a robust kit. Your first kit will probably be very hard to use, especially if you haven't learned from using other peoples' kits already. Instead, see our list of to download a free pre-made modular kit suitable for prototyping.

But if you have experience in level design and 3D tools, then you are ready. On this page we will detail the many considerations and best practices for designing your own modular kit.

Verticality is vertical flow, how it feels to move upwards and downwards.

Imagine steadily climbing up a cliff or descending deep into a dark dungeon. These height changes embody the player's progression, and help orient the player towards their goals. A quest might tell the player to travel north, but that goal is impossible if they can't tell where north is. Instead, if the quest tasks the player with climbing to the top of a mountain, or descending down to the bottom of a valley -- up and down are much more obvious and unmistakable.

Verticality mechanics

When discussing verticality, we assume we're designing for a typical 3D action game with two common physics constraints:

Copyright

All cited material, illustrations, quotes, game screenshots, video embeds, game content, etc. belong to those original creators or studios. This book includes such content for non-commercial educational purposes under doctrine and we always attempt to credit and link back to original authors as much as possible.

Because of the complex communal authorship of this book's material, we will never paywall this book nor sell any copies of it.

And for a similar reason, we generally do not include material from other level design books, because fair use is less clear in these cases. You should purchase and read those books instead.

In architecture, circulation generally refers to the "in-between" areas that connect other areas, like hallways, aisles, and stairs.

Some level designers call this connectivity. But for this book, we think circulation is a better word and concept that more level designers should adopt.

Types of circulation

Real world architects distinguish between several types of circulation:

• Primary vs. secondary circulation (path to main elevator vs. path to storage closet)

• Public vs. private circulation (ground floor lobby vs. bedroom hallway)

• Horizontal vs. vertical circulation (hallway vs. stairs)

Many of these concerns often don't directly apply to level design. Unlike sad unfortunate real world architects, we can design virtual buildings without any concern for building codes, ordinances, or thermodynamics. However, these words and concepts are still useful.

In level design, there are at least two more different types of circulation:

• Diegetic circulation: look and feel of the circulation, the in-game fiction of the space.

  • intersects with and

  • crucial for single player levels, especially in a realistic style

Diegetic circulation

Diegetic circulation refers to how fictional in-game characters would use the space.

In film studies, diegesis is the imaginary fictional world depicted on screen. Ask yourself, how would players roleplay their movement through the level? What is the theme of this space? What is the story behind this circulation pattern?

For single player levels, conveying circulation is crucial for . If you want your level to feel like a plausible real-world space, then you must also think like a plausible real-world architect with plausible real-world circulation.

When designing their exploration game Gone Home (2013), The Fullbright Company chose to work with an old mansion theme because modern suburban houses orbit around a central room with flat dense connectivity, but mansions branch deeply into distinct wings. This mansion trope supported the hub-and-spoke they wanted, which helped them tell the story they wanted.

The first half of Gone Home's critical path starts from the "Front Porch" (bottom center) and ends in the Basement (top left) while frequently backtracking on itself, resulting in a free-form exploration feel that supports Gone Home's experience goal of investigating an empty mansion.

It wouldn't feel like an investigation (nor a mansion) if every clue led to a new area. Instead, we learn to dwell in this space and grow more familiar with it. In this way, architectural research is crucial for levels focused on story, otherwise the diegetic circulation may not support the desired critical path.

Diegetic circulation as wayfinding

Players follow circulation based on their current objectives. If they must find the exit, then players will follow primary circulation. If they need to reach the roof, players will look for vertical circulation. If players need to sneak around or explore for resources, they use secondary circulation.

Generally, wider bigger passages feel like primary public circulation, while narrower areas will feel more like secondary circulation. But imagine walking in a level and seeing a big wide door and a smaller narrower door. Which door leads to the exit? The big door could lead to primary circulation and an exit. But if the bigger door looks like a garage door for a vehicle, then maybe it's locked and we should take the smaller door... so now the smaller door is more likely to feel like primary circulation...

For more on player navigation, see .

Formal circulation

Formal circulation focuses on the layout's physical function (the "form") and affordance for movement.

Here we ignore the theme, setting, and culture. Think about the level in terms of abstract level geometric shapes. Ask yourself, how would a professional player or speedrunner understand this map?

Lanes

Lanes are formal primary circulation in a multiplayer map.

Lanes help players predict and coordinate movement. A large map with too many lanes or no clear lane hierarchy will function like a maze; players won't know where to focus their efforts, get lost, and miss each other.

For this reason, most maps use only 1-3 lanes.

One lane

Payload maps for team-based multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch focus gameplay and conflict along a single lane that snakes around the entire map. The attacking team must "push" the payload cart forward by standing near it, while the defending team must prevent the cart from reaching the end of the lane. The payload route is prominently marked so that players can easily coordinate efforts (or prepare ambushes). Occasionally, there are extra half-lanes and back alleys to help attackers break through defenses.

Three lane

Lanes are also common in competitive multiplayer games about territory control such as in MOBAs like League of Legends or military shooters like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike. These games' maps often use a three lane format, three bidirectional critical paths that occasionally branch and intersect via smaller lanes. (In MOBAs, the tangle of smaller interstitial lanes / secondary circulation are collectively known as the jungle.)

If an opponent has blocked progress on one lane, then the other player(s) can attempt to flank around them by advancing on another lane. Alternatively, if a player wants to try to avoid conflict entirely, then they can avoid the main lanes and try to farm the jungle.

Lane asymmetry is important, each lane should feel different. In Summoner's Rift (League of Legends), the top and bottom lanes are longer than the middle lane, and the top lane has a powerful boss while the bottom has a weaker mid boss. In de_dust2 (CS:GO), teams must decide whether to focus on site A or B and how to approach or flank; or if the team chooses poorly, they might need to move through the mid lane to the other side of the map.

Rotating

Rotating (primarily in Counter-Strike) is when players must move from one lane to another. It generally requires teamwork and coordination, and the tension between rotating vs. not-rotating is a core element of team-based competitive multiplayer games.

Functional doors are notoriously one of the most complicated objects to implement for a video game. On this page, we will outline why doors are so tricky and difficult, as well as various time-tested strategies for scripting door behaviors in levels.

The door problem

A rotating door is dynamic level geometry that blocks visibility (sometimes) and blocks movement (sometimes), can be interrupted or locked or destroyed, might be obstructed by inanimate objects or characters... This wide-ranging combination of possible states results in many edge cases that are difficult to handle gracefully.

For an introduction to door dilemmas, see Liz England's blog post "The Door Problem" which touches on the door as a tricky intersection between all departments at a large game studio.

The simplest, most stable bug-free type of video game door is no door. So before you add a door to your level, ask yourself, do you really need a door there?

However, if you must have doors, we discuss two categories of door problems: movement and state.

How to handle door movement

First, decide on the type of door movement to implement.

Sliding doors are much simpler than rotating doors. They can recede into a wall / floor / ceiling, and cannot be easily blocked from opening. However, a sliding door does imply a powerful or industrialized society that can manufacture and operate sliding doors, e.g. a huge portcullis, canal lock, sensor-based glass supermarket door, or futuristic sci-fi Star Trek door might be inappropriate for your level's fiction.

Rotating doors sweep over a large area and easily trap objects, and can be easily blocked from opening or closing by standing in the way. This makes their physics more complicated than sliding doors. Yet they are much more mundane and commonplace in the real world than sliding doors, and imply non-futuristic worldbuilding.

For most door physics problems, err on the side of player convenience, even if it's unrealistic or unfair. That's our basic guiding tenet behind these general practices for handling door movement and collision:

• For convenience, rotating doors should be double-hinged and open in both directions, outwards / away from the character opening the door. (via )

• If NPCs can use the door, their AI should "pinch" through the doorway and avoid blocking others. If NPCs have pathfinding AI, dynamically generate or manually place AI hint nodes to force NPCs to stay away from the door unless they are using it. (via )

• If the level is about exploring, let opened doors remain open so that players can track where they have been. But if the level is about high tension or combat, slowly close doors automatically behind the player to simplify the encounter space. (via )

How to handle door state

Levels often have a variety of doors, so the core door script must support different behaviors. If there is no pre-existing door entity in your toolset, you may have to engineer your own.

The most basic type of door has two states: open or closed.

But an animated door can also be moving -- opening or closing -- and some doors could be partially-open (ajar). You might need OpenStart, Opening, OpenFinished events, as well as CloseStart, Closing, and CloseFinished events. These different events provide useful places to insert sound hooks, animation, or physics impulses.

Some common parameters and settings to expose for a door object:

• moveDistance / rotateDistance, in engine units (sliding door) or degrees (rotating door)

  • some projects or use cases may need a configurable axis of movement (e.g. a drawbridge does not rotate around its "up" axis)

  • rotating doors need a hinge

Additionally, you may want to expose different ways of opening or closing the door for level designers. Implement basic Open(), Close(), and Toggle() functions, as well as a ForceOpen() or ForceClose() variant that might apply additional physics hacks or teleportation to ensure the door changes state regardless of obstacles.

Locked doors

The simplest locked door state is true / false. However, this binary doesn't always reflect how we use locked doors in level design. Locked doors can become surprisingly complicated:

• What if some locked doors can always be closed, while other locked doors cannot be open / closed no matter what? These are two different types of locked door.

• What if some locked doors are fake doors that lead nowhere and serve only as set dressing to fill wall space and imply diegetic circulation? This is another different type of locked door.

• What if some doors can be lockpicked, but certain quest-related critical path locks require the specific key? (e.g. Skyrim) These are yet another two different types of locked door.

Understanding furniture

Most furniture has at least one of four functions: (1) sitting, (2) tabling (work, display), (3) storing, (4) sleeping. But function is just one way to think about furniture. Furniture and its placement also reflects social status, wealth, culture, technology, climate, and personal expression. When we craft and place virtual furniture in our levels, it reflects all these understandings.

In level design, furniture is certainly crucial for environmental storytelling narratives and set dressing in an art pass, but it also implies a formal gameplay function. If you're playing a contemporary cover shooter and you see an antique wooden chair, then you would understand it as movable soft cover. If you're playing a game with crafting and salvage systems, you might break down the chair for a small amount of wood. If you're playing a battle royale or prop hunt multiplayer game, then a misplaced chair would suggest someone has visited that location. Furniture is part of the game state!

Two brief disclaimers:

1. This history is biased toward a Western understanding of furniture, and as with most material histories, it's also biased toward rich people because their objects get preserved and studied.

2. We approach furniture from the needs of a level designer. This page is less about the specific history, and more about how to furnish your level effectively, organized by historical time period and culture.

Prehistoric furniture (6000 BC - 3000 BC)

Neolithic artifacts depict people sitting, like the .

.

Ancient furniture (3000 BC - CE 600)

It's hard to know a lot about ancient furniture because most wood pieces have decayed / disappeared. Our knowledge of ancient furniture comes from historical accounts, carvings / paintings, and rare preserved pieces from volcanic disaster sites and tombs.

Ancient seating

The most common piece of furniture around the ancient Mediterranean was a wooden stool with low rectangular seat and 4 legs. Common Egyptian stools had woven reed seats, and a Greek diphros often had turned (rounded) legs.

Public places had built-in stone benches, or people would bring their own X-shaped folding stools.

Chairs were generally reserved for upper class or the elite. Greek thrones, klismos, and klinai had elegant sweeping lines. Egyptian chairs were more angular but still very refined and clean, more advanced than a lot of medieval European furniture.

Ancient tables

Built-in stone counters and tables were common. Greek tables were low, rectangular tops with 3 legs, usually next to a klinai for upper class dining.

Ancient containers

Ancient Egyptian furniture: didn't change much for thousands of years, but pharoahs furniture have very fine wood working, better technicals than most medieval furniture... very clean lines and shapes, almost modernist

Common ancient Greco-Roman furniture: mostly built-in benches, stools, and counters... if you did have a table, it was low and movable to stow away when you weren't using it

Rich Greco-Roman people had couches and X-shaped folding stools (imported from Egypt?) (Roman politicians)

Greco-Roman chairs symbolized power: thrones

Chairs and stools were somewhat rare in Asia and the Americas: common to sit on the floor or on a mat

Medieval furniture (600-1500)

Medieval Europe

rich people were basically nomadic, would move around a lot (easier to follow food than to bring food to a centralized place) so they used lots of chests, small movable furniture, and tapestries / cloths decorate the permanent furniture they'd leave in place... then pack everything up and move on to the next residence

Since rich people signaled wealth through possessions, high emphasis on sturdy chests + tiered buffets to display fancy silks, plates, and artifacts. Dye is very fancy!

Chairs still aren't super common. Throne with foot stool, raised on dais. Height is very important. Commoner can sit on a chair by themselves, but in the presence of a monarch they must sit on benches and stools, if at all. Benches are the most common seating

Rooms are mostly empty, furniture pushed to the side when not in use... Tables were brought out and setup for events / dinner, then stowed away... again, remember the furniture is purely functional, the tablecloth is the actual decorative element

Tables are long, everyone sits on one side with their backs to the wall... powerful couples sit in the middle

The one big exception is churches, which weren't nomadic, so they could have huge elaborate carvings with big heavy furniture

This is where furniture and architecture intersect; furniture carved like a building

Tools were hung on walls, free-standing wood shelves were rare (!), usually wood planks set into a wall cavity instead

Renaissance furniture (1500-1600)

Printing press made Renaissance / study of antiquity possible... equipped with manuals, Renaissance artists make better Classical copies than Medieval artisans

Rich people are finding enough stability to settle down and permanently decorate, e.g. Venice ...

Furniture craftsmanship now becoming complex enough to form specific guilds, e.g. joiners ... 1500s sees upholstery, drawers, and matching furniture to interiors... Queen Elizabeth orders marble-topped tables

Tables are broader and less long, everyone sits on both sides, important couple sits at the ends of the table

Carved buffet

In Spain, leather is more common than wood? (Moorish influence treats wood as a rare decorative material vs. structural material)

Early modern furniture (1600-1800)

in Europe: rise of English and French furniture export industries, English furniture was boring but high quality, French furniture was trendy and luxuriously expensive but lower craftsmanship

in England: Lots of trade, lots of interest in India (caning seats) and China (lacquering)... "the Chinese fashion" in 1700s... Lacquered chest on a stand... rise of ebony... large mirror (very expensive) with marble-topped side table and china displayed on top. "Japanning" is English imitation of Chinese lacquer

in France: Rise of upholstery, comfort, modern ideas of luxury (Versailles) ... Rich people bedrooms were social spaces where you receive guests (pg 84), but also now separation of public and private (e.g. petit-apartments in Versailles vs public courtly rooms), invention of the dining room

Renaissance humanism: understanding, classifying, collecting diverse materials and styles of the world... even more specialization of craft (pg. 99) ... Pinnacle of carved furniture and veneered cabinets ... rococo

Early industrial furniture (1800-1900)

English Regency, Greek revival, French Empire (Napoleon)

in England: neo-classical counter-reaction, Invention of the classic "timeless" chair, country joiners repeated the same chair and table over and over (e.g. American Shaker ladder back, stick-back Windsor) ... Rise of middle class, good furniture becoming more common

In the US: rocking chairs offered to guests

Sprung upholstery, Chesterfield couches, new focus on comfort and coziness... birth of furniture placement and filling a room with furniture (pg 133)

Thonet bentwood chair!!!

Modern furniture (1900-1950)

Contemporary furniture (1950+)

Sources

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Furniture: A Concise History. Thames and Hudson: 2005.

Prospect-refuge theory is a widespread belief in architecture that humans have an "inborn desire" to seek out prospect (vantage points / lookouts) and refuge (enclosures safe from threats / view).

This book argues that prospect-refuge, as traditionally understood, has limited application to level design. Risk / safety / information in video games often differs greatly from real world architectural assumptions. (And frankly, we're also skeptical whether it's useful for real world architecture.)

At the end of this page, we suggest an alternative application of prospect-refuge theory, using already existing terms and concepts in level design.

(TODO: prospect refuge illustration with big red Xs)

History

In his 1975 book The Experience of Landscape, geographer Jay Appleton combined psychologist Daniel Berlyne's "arousal theory" with early evolutionary psychology to form his prospect-refuge theory. It's worth tracing how this happened.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Berlyne experimented with lab rats and curiosity. He argued that when a lab rat (or a human) sees a new space, they feel "aroused" as they process the unfamiliar environment.

Note that Berlyne does not mean sexual arousal, but instead something more like engagement -- a general state of increased energy expenditure and mental responsiveness. That is, a more complex and novel environment stimulates more arousal / engagement.

However, too much complexity and novelty is negative. In his 1960 book Conflict, Arousal and Curiosity, Berlyne cautions that too much of this environmental arousal can lead to anxiety and uncertainty. When graphed below, it is a "U-shaped" effect:

The basic premise of evolutionary psychology is that humans are just like any other animal with survival instinct. Appleton reasoned that Berlyne's environmental arousal also aided human evolutionary fitness. Increased mental responsiveness would've been useful for a caveman / early human to parse threats and find safe places from predators.

Outside of psychology, no really cared about this until 1988, when architectural historian Grant Hildebrand popularized Appleton's prospect-refuge. Hildebrand wanted to strengthen modernist architecture's claims to universal design and function, and so psychology was an effective way to argue why architect Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings supposedly had intrinsic psychological appeal -- culminating in his 1999 book Origins of Architectural Pleasure. (Maybe these men were indeed alluding to sexual arousal.)

Criticism

There are several ways to critique prospect-refuge theory, including its science and philosophy:

• Berlyne's behaviorism and psychology of aesthetics

  • does studying lab rats' aesthetics actually teach us anything about human aesthetics?

  • can art and aesthetics be studied in this way at all?

At first glance, prospect-refuge theory seems very applicable to games. It is about survival and safety, like many 3D action games. But for the many reasons listed above, we think it is better not to rely on it.

How to use prospect-refuge in level design: maybe don't.

We argue that these same ideas are more useful if we utilize already existing terms and concepts in level design instead. These industry-specific terms have less philosophical baggage and offer more technical specificity, especially for combat games.

• Instead of prospect, use sightline / vista.

• Instead of refuge, use cover / enclosure / base / safe house.

Instead of prospect...

A sightline is a line of empty space where one area can be seen from another area.

A vista is a vantage point with access to many distant sightlines. It is most useful in single player level design to convey progression beats, preview landmarks, and offer layout information -- especially for an arena layout before an encounter begins.

(TODO: link to specialized sightline and vista pages)

Instead of refuge...

The problem with the word "refuge" is that it implies safety. But the video games, the player's sense of safety is complicated, and extends far beyond the level design.

For many action games, threat assessment is a core mechanic / skill that players must develop over time, dependent on the overall combat design.

Survival and death systems also vary greatly between games: some may reward players for death, or even penalize survival.

Safety as game state

A dozen hours into the action RPG Elden Ring (2022), the player enters a "debate parlor" in a magical castle. When most players reach this point, it will feel very dangerous.

• In Elden Ring, the most difficult boss enemies tend to inhabit highly decorated landmark areas. So the unique art assets here differentiate the room from past rooms, it stands out as a special area of high importance.

• The player has reached this point after fighting through 3-5 encounters, and is probably wondering where the next save point is. Past boss arenas featured convenient save points before the fight; this one does not, and pushes players to risk their progress.

(screenshot: debate parlor entry)

Suddenly, a giant glowing wizard wolf begins growling at the player.

• The wolf has a name and a large health bar, indicating it is a dangerous boss enemy.

• The medium-sized room makes the large wolf feel even larger. It will be difficult to dodge the wolf's attacks.

• Furniture and clutter further limit the player's mobility and options. (Until the boss destroys the furniture, opening up more floor space, making the fight a bit easier.)

(screenshot: battle begins proper)

Note all the factors that make the situation feel dangerous: the UI, consistent use of environment art, the past encounters and progression system, even the music.

After defeating the boss, only a quiet "grace" campfire-like save point remains. This landmark boss arena now functions as a safe house, territory won by the player after a difficult battle. The chaotic half-demolished parliament chamber now takes on the mood of a peaceful ruin.

This is the same room, but it undergoes three different state changes before, during, and after the encounter.

• sense of safety depends less on layout / blockout / architecture, and instead more on the wider game systems / encounter design patterns

• game worlds change ownership and function much more frequently than in the real world

• something won't "look safe" if past levels featured traps or ambushes

Thus, "refuge" is a situation / game state, not a formal quality of architecture. No shape or layout is intrinsically safe.

Enclosure

So what word should we use instead of refuge?

We propose enclosure: the degree that an area is surrounded by cover.

Cover is any object that blocks a sightline and/or combat.

TODO: base / safe house

As discussed in the introduction, remember that there's different types of level design. Thus, there's different types of level design books.

• We generally don't recommend any pre-2000s level design book. A lot has changed in 20+ years. The game industry and culture is very different, not to mention the tools, workflow, and language.

• As discussed on our license / copyright page, we generally avoid including content from other level design books. You should borrow / buy these books yourself.

Generalist level design books

Generalist books approach level design as one aspect of a much larger design problem. These types of books are usually written by academics who have studied this topic from multiple angles.

If you are more of a big picture type of thinker, or if you're suspicious of the game industry, then these are the books for you.

However, zooming-out also means missing out on more specific technical details. This philosophical focus can feel unhelpful for beginners wrestling with a level editor.

• (2014) by Christopher Totten is a theory-heavy generalist level design textbook. Totten connects a lot of core architecture education (basic drafting, parti, prospect and refuge, etc.) to some game examples. A good roundup of conceptual design theory.

• (2017) edited by Christopher Totten is a collection of case studies covering many level design topics from a variety of academics, critics, and devs. This diverse survey is useful for gauging our collective understanding of level design, but all these different contexts vary greatly in aim and approach. What does a Yakuza player's personal essay have in common with a research overview of PCG methods? An interesting question, though the answer won't readily apply to beginners.

Industry level design books

Industry books are written by working level designers who have shipped some 3D AAA action shooter games. They tend to have a narrower focus than generalist academics, zooming-in on specific techniques and situations. For beginners, this will seem better than non-industry academic philosophers.

To become this specific, there is a price -- these books must make a lot of assumptions about genre and audience, and they rarely imagine any larger overarching theory. It often reads like a pile of random do's and don'ts. But if your creative goals match the industry's, then you'll find a lot of useful advice here.

• (2008) by Sjoerd "Hourences" De Jong is among the best 3D level design books available, though some of it has aged poorly since 15+ years ago. Yet De Jong is an experienced industry developer who has built lots of 3D levels, and much of that work experience reflects his straightforward advice and examples. Given the book's age, familiarize yourself with the , or else De Jong's golden age fascination with low poly construction might not make sense.

• (2020) by Max Pears is maybe the first (and only) encounter design book ever, with lots of diagrams with cute cartoon illustrations. However, note that Pears assumes you're not just making a shooter, but a fairly specific military-themed shooter with specific enemy types and weapons, etc. Still, he offers a lot of useful language and patterns for combat games.

Game reference books / art books

Prestige AAA release often feature companion "art books" which show lots of process images and asset breakdowns from production, for a "behind the scenes" look and feel. These books tend to focus on environment art, with lots of concept art and asset breakdowns.

• (2004) by David Hodgson is perhaps the most celebrated game art book of all time. Back in the 2000s when Valve still regularly made single player games with great craft and secrecy, this book offered a rare look into Valve's history and archives. Today it's a bit sad to read; it's a record of a golden age long past, when Valve was an inspiring design leader rather than just our benevolent landlord.

• (2016) by Ian Tucker follows Valve's torchbearer Arkane Studios and their highly involved creative process. Arkane is one of the last AAA studios still making prestige single player story-shooter games with golden age level design sensibilities, and many level designers still look up to them.

Architecture books

Understanding the basics of real world architecture is useful for level design.

• by Matthew Frederic is the classic architecture and fast design primer that most industry level designers have at least skimmed through. It's enough architecture education to talk at a party, and its brevity ensures you'll actually finish reading it. However, since it is so short, it doesn't actually study any specific buildings -- which is like studying literature without reading any books. This is good for an overview of concepts, but it won't give you any examples to practice applying those concepts.

• by Francis Ching often gets assigned in first year university architecture courses, but it's still approachable enough for non-architects to engage. Ching's confident hand drawn examples urge the reader to focus on timeless fundamentals rather than flashy CAD aesthetics. There's a specificity and attention to actual buildings which is missing from Frederic's abbreviated approach. However, where Frederic will spell something out very clearly, Ching is more elusive and expects you to do more of the thinking yourself.

Architectural reference

• Grammar of Architecture

To review...

• Generalist level design books try to understand it from many angles

• Industry level design books focus on specific genres and styles

• Architecture books offer a third perspective: what if you had to live in your levels, what if level design was thousands of years old?

• Try to read everything, the future isn't just in one place

Why do research?

Your level does not exist by itself. Your level exists within a community of other people making levels, within a history of people making levels before (and after) you. Look at how others tackled design problems, and learn from their successes and failures.

Research also helps you get started with your project. Instead of staring at a blank page, you will have a collection of inspirations and influences to help you design your level.

To understand a level design problem better, do some research. Collect references of other levels and real-world structures, then breakdown a specific reference to go deeper into detail and study its construction. To pick out more general patterns, assemble a

Below, we recommend level design talks that are: (1) from experienced designers, (2) aimed at other level designers, (3) free to access.

Talks are grouped by topic, more recent at the top. ⭐ = especially influential / famous

The critical path (or golden path) is the main intended player path / procedure to complete the level and progress.

• usually for single player levels with scripted progressions, not multiplayer

• highlights the most important ("critical") parts of the level.

What's a texture / material?

A texture is a 2D image that wraps around a 3D object, like an animal skin or wallpaper. For levels, we usually apply environment textures to cover floors and walls in the game world.

Early 3D games used one texture per object. The color painted in Photoshop was often the same color seen in the game, it was very direct and straightforward. But today we often use multiple textures together, instead of just one.

A material is a group of texture maps + settings for a surface. Each texture map represents a different aspect or quality, rather than the actual color to render on screen. While there are many ways to pack textures and materials, most materials in most 3D game engines use these four main texture types:

• Diffuse or albedo (pronounced /AL-bee-doe/) is the base color of the surface

  • For transparent materials, also pack a transparency mask into the albedo's alpha channel

• Normal map or bump map encodes the micro-details, scratches, indentations in the surface

(materials diagram)

Texture types

World textures

World textures are reusable tiling images that cover the underlying foundation of level geometry. These are the main ground and wall textures used for the level.

Good world texturing usually:

• Reads well at multiple viewing distances

  • its substance is clear from short, medium, or long distances

  • interesting to look at, but not too interesting to be distracting

Rock textures

Rock textures require special planning and design. Tectonic forces form cliffs and mountains into distinctive shapes and layers; in order for a cliff texture to seem like a plausible cliff, the texture's structure should reflect this unique geology and accentuate the cliff geometry's shape.

For low polygon cliff geometry, a rock texture with strong structure / crack layout will visually break up the rock shape and make it seem much more complicated than it really is. Divide the rock texture into layers / chunks, which is, you know, how rocks exist in real-life.

Wall textures

Thinking modularly

Many wall textures are designed to tile horizontally, but not necessarily vertically. Edge detail at the top and bottom helps emphasize where the wall meets the ceiling and the floor, simulating ambient occlusion / the realistic accumulation of dirt.

To take the segmentation further, keep the middle of the wall texture fairly plain. For short or tall walls, you can either add or remove subdivisions based on this repeatable middle section. A segmented / modular texture is more flexible to use.

For low polygon art styles, it is very useful to paint details and structure directly into the wall texture; that way you won't have to model or bake these details manually.

Panels

When modeling modular buildings made of panels, combine all the panel segments into one texture. Painting individual edge details (dirt, grime, shadow) can help accentuate each panel and make them feel unique / less repetitive. The panel layout should accommodate various sizes and shapes, to give more flexibility.

Trim sheets

Trim sheet... Sunset Overdrive "ultimate bevel" talk?

Multiple related subtextures grouped together, designed to be used together

But a trim sheet is not magic, in fact it makes the texture even more difficult to use. Really, anything can function as a

Hotspot UVs

A new recent trend in

Half-Life Alyx hotspot UVs (DreamUV)

How to make textures

Texture art for games is obviously a big topic that deserves its own book. We can't really teach you how to become a texture artist, this is a skill that people spend years learning and practicing.

Here, we will only talk about the general workflow for creating textures for levels.

For links to free textures, or recommended game art books and websites, see .

Handpainting

Photosourcing

Baking a sculpt

Procedural texture synthesis

Today, Substance Designer is overwhelmingly the primary environmental texturing tool across the industry. By connecting various samplers and operations together into a node graph, artists can visually program a texture synthesis pipeline to procedurally generate many texture maps and variations at a time. If you're coming to Substance from a Photoshop background, imagine Photoshop Actions and filters on steroids.

There are two main advantages to this workflow over the traditional handpainting method: (1) you can easily resample textures at higher resolutions at any time, (2) the modular workflow means you can reuse graphs.

For example: if you handpaint a stone wall texture in Photoshop at 512x512, there's no easy way to sample higher resolution textures or make similar variations on that stone wall. But if you build a Substance graph to generate that stone wall, then you can set the exporter to 2048x2048 or input a different heightmap to make countless variations very quickly.

How to apply textures

Gather a palette

Triplanar projection

Texture alignment

It's not really a big deal

Further reading

• . An artist-focused primer to different texture map types.

Trims and trim sheets

• by Morten Olsen (Insomniac Games) is a talk on how a relatively small environment art team created a wide variety of looks for a large open world game. Great introduction to trim sheet construction and texture variants, but today you'd probably want to model the bevels instead of normal mapping the bevel.

• by Shubham Kumar covers the full process. Kumar starts by gathering material reference, then measures the trim sheet metrics / grid, then synthesizes the materials in Substance and applies the trim sheet to a model.

Find a level design community

There are many benefits to joining a level design community:

• help with design problems / troubleshooting tools

• provide critical feedback for your work

• motivation and encouragement

Ideally, join a game-specific community

A game specific community can offer focused help / experience, and they are much more likely to playtest your work and give good feedback.

For game-specific level design communities, see the "Community" column in .

Generalist level design communities

• is an annual internet tradition where level designers post screenshots on Twitter during the month of October. The most popular tweets usually come from AAA industry level designers posting blockouts of their work from famous commercial games.

• is one of the longest running active message boards for level design, and focuses mainly on Source Engine games (CS:GO, Team Fortress 2) but many members also regularly mod other games and use Unity and Unreal. Mix of modders and industry users.

• is a Discord community for level designers founded by Ryan Smith.

Environment art communities

• is best for 3D environment artists, lighting artists, and anyone concerned more with the visual side of level design. Projects skew heavily towards Unreal Engine 4 scenes with Maya / Max / ZBrush / Blender know-how. No one here will ever playtest your project, but they will happily critique screenshots or video. Mix of students and industry users.

• features news, articles, and guides for game / film / VFX artists. It is often very technical and tool focused, usually focusing on pipeline and workflow with visual-oriented breakdowns of particular scenes or projects.

• features interviews with environment artists, articles and guides, as well as a podcast. Like other CG art communities, it focuses on tools and techniques.

Theory, writing, criticism

Venues / publications

• (formerly Level Design Workshop, Level Design In A Day) is a full day of talks from industry and indie level designers every year. After many years it has found a medium-sized audience at GDC. Unfortunately there's no convenient list of past sessions, but maybe we'll put that together someday. Open submissions every summer / autumn.

• is probably the premier level design criticism publication at the moment, featuring short blog posts as well as long-form features and interviews. Commissions and pitches year-round, pays writers.

• has hosted several design-focused series, such as (game design breakdowns),

Blogs / streams / podcasts

• is a free Harvard-branded online course about architectural theory and history that runs every year, popular among industry level designers for its conceptual focus.

• makes videos about his experience as AAA level designer and gives advice for level design portfolios and resources.

• writes posts about open world AAA production and encounter systems, usually with a Ubisoft-like approach.

Screenshot accounts

Below are some fun Twitter accounts which exist solely to post screenshots of community levels; they're good to follow because seeing more levels will help you train your eye for level design, and it's fun to see what other people make.

• posts Quake 1 map screenshots

• posts GoldSrc (Half-Life 1 engine) map screenshots

• posts custom Doom WAD screenshots

This page lists free art assets (models, textures, materials) for use in levels.

• We only list sites with robust free download plans + generic file formats that work in most engines.

• "CC license" refers to free assets with permissive Creative Commons or public domain style licenses.

• We also list other types of resources:

  • : list of other level design books, with brief summaries

  • : list of free texture .WADs and other Quake-specific files

3D models and props (free)

Materials and textures (free)

Prototyping blockout textures

When making the , we recommend using gridded placeholder textures to prototype the level geometry. This helps establish consistent scale and for the level.

• by Ciathyza (Unity)

• by Code Respawn (Unreal 4)

• by Tom Looman (Unreal 4)

• by Kenney (.png)

Skyboxes

A skybox is a special type of 6-sided cubemap texture that gives the illusion of a distant sky background. Contemporary game engines usually use procedural sky shaders / skydomes, but sometimes the old fashioned ways are more effective.

Quake / Half-Life style skyboxes

2D tilesets and sprites (free)

To make 2D levels, you'll usually want a tile-based level editor. See .

Introduction

In this project, you'll research, pitch, and prototype a combat encounter for a modern commercial action shooter game, with dynamic squad formations and battle lines.

1. Research

Review combat in Uncharted 4 (10-60 min)

Ideally, you have played an Uncharted game or some sort of cover shooter action game. If you have never played any of these games, you should go play one now before continuing. At the very least, play past the tutorial level and get through a few gun fights, which will likely take at least an hour.

If you are familiar with the genre, then take some time to review how the game plays. Search for "Uncharted 4 combat gameplay" on YouTube and watch at least 10 minutes of game footage.

While you watch the video, reflect on these questions:

• How do most combat encounters in Uncharted 4 begin? How does the player know when combat has begun? How does the player know where the enemies are?

• How long does the fight last? Does it feel like a small fight or a big fight, and why?

• Are there any "beats" to the combat encounter? What is the pacing and the combat story?

Watch this developer talk about Uncharted 4's combat AI (60 min)

Next, watch this GDC 2017 talk about Uncharted 4's combat AI and encounter design tools. Feel free to take notes, and refer to the for reference.

Every game manages its combat AI differently, but Uncharted 4's core approach is similar enough to other action games and cover shooters that it represents current industry practice. An encounter designer or combat designer must understand game systems as well as AI tools.

Research questions (15 min)

• Analyze the strengths and limitations of the "zone" approach used in Uncharted 1-3.

• Gallant's team prototyped several new systems for Uncharted 4, but ultimately did not use them. Analyze the strengths and limitations of one of these failed approaches.

• Gallant was inspired by Pac-Man's ghost AI while designing Uncharted 4's three (3) main combat roles. Do you remember these roles?

2. Layout

Now it's time to design your own dynamic combat encounter.

Sketch an encounter (20 minutes)

Sketch 10+ thumbnail diagrams within 1-2 minutes. Don't overthink it, just draw any shapes that might symbolize how the encounter would play out.

Then, sketch a of a small combat encounter for an Uncharted-like action game. But do NOT try to sketch something as big and complicated as in Uncharted 4! Clarity is more important than ambition. Keep it small. The encounter should last 2-3 minutes for the player.

• Define 1 for the encounter. What kind of combat or tactics will your encounter emphasize?

• Design at least 1 and at least 2 beats.

• Label core elements like player and enemy spawns, items, cover, and crucial , as well as hard points / zones.

(TODO: show some encounter sketch samples)

Pitch your encounter (5 minutes)

Pitch your design to someone else, and have them use the rubric below to judge your pitch. For example. they might say your experience goal felt memorable, but doesn't really support any clear paths or strategies, and too many questions remain unanswered.

In your pitch, make sure you narrate different ways how the combat encounter would likely play out, while summarizing your intent and the player experience. Good luck!

Encounter pitch evaluation rubric

3. Blockout

Try to implement your design plan within an actual game.

Play a game with combat (2 hours)

Play a , ideally a game with a "semi-dynamic" or "dynamic" combat setup.

TODO: identify a game that can actually support this exercise... lol

• Pay attention to how the game plays / how the game sets up its combat encounters.

• What are the various enemy types and roles?

Prototype your encounter in the game (xx hours)

Open the level editor and build a level with a dynamic combat encounter.

You don't have to follow your plan from the Layout phase exactly, but use your sketch as a general guide while you blockout and prototype.

Playtest your encounter / share it with others

The history of architecture is obviously very complicated and beyond the scope of this book. This page is just a minimal summary to help you guide your own research.

When studying historical architecture, the simplest question we can ask is: why did they build it like that back then? There's usually at least three explanations:

• People: society, culture, religion, warfare

• Geography: climate, water, food, resources, materials

• Technology: literacy, education, engineering, physics

Some things to keep in mind when we think about old buildings:

• It used to be colorful. Ancient peoples painted buildings just like we do today. A thousand years later, ruins look gray and bare today, but they didn't always look like that.

• Ancient wood buildings have not survived. But that doesn't mean they never existed.

• History is biased towards fancy architecture, rather than common "vernacular architecture." Yet game worlds often center on everyday homes and workplaces rather than monuments.

3500 BCE

During the late "Stone Age" or Neolithic Period (10000 BCE - 2500 BCE), humans around the world began living in small tribal / clan settlements, usually near rivers and lakes.

They built 1-floor single room homes on shallow foundations with stones, mud, wood, and/or thatch. Sometimes a moat / ditch surrounded the village for defense and drainage (). Larger villages might've had granaries to store food (), or focused on industrial specialization like mining (). Most used some kind of pottery, but some were "aceramic" and relied on baskets (). Religion was usually small and personal, like a household shrine or a small village temple to a mother goddess.

In the few rare big cities that did exist (10,000-40,000 people), rulers and elites needed more complicated religions and bureaucracies to maintain control. They justified their authority with bigger and taller palaces, temples, and gates, made of more luxurious materials -- like kiln-fired brick and tile requires burning a lot of wood (). But still, most settlements / regions were not unified under a single power -- instead they were fragmented, diverse, and egalitarian.

2500 BCE

During the "Bronze Age" (3000 BCE - 1200 BCE), bigger settlements became more common. Ancient cities have evidence of urban elite -- bigger compounds with rarer materials and objects.

The built big cities like with complex drainage systems built into large platforms of millions of bricks laid in an urban grid. Yet despite the complex organization and labor it would've required, the city layout is private and hierarchical, with little evidence of a central ruler or religious authority (like any other ancient city).

In Mesopotamia, the was an architectural milestone with monumental stairs and platforms assembled as abstract -- the temple evokes a unified vision and aesthetic, and it is possibly the first example of formal architecture in human history. Again, the sheer number of bricks implies a lot of resources, labor, and social organization.

There were also other similarly monumental architecture milestones around the world at this time, in Egypt (), Malta (), England (), and Peru (). All these wonders served a religious / ritual center function. However we still don't know much about these places / societies.

1500 BCE

The Ghaggar-Hakra River dried up, and unknown invaders overran Mesopotamia; other powers began developing around the Mediterranean.

The ruler Ramses I consolidated power and religion at , a city-temple complex along the Nile River. Temples followed a linear . Festival parades / "processions" entered temples through majestic engraved and painted with the pharaoh's great deeds, expressing both power and cosmology in an iconic trapezoidal shape. After passing through more pylons, courtyards, and chambers, the path forked to an innermost sanctum with a to absorb religious offerings. The , the pinnacle of Egyptian rock temples, also features an inner sanctuary with a sacrificial altar, illuminated by the light of the rising sun at dawn.

Egyptian columns were highly symbolic and inspired Greek and Roman designs. Lotus / papyrus pattern columns mark sacred spaces, giving form to creation myths about the earth holding up the sky -- the bundled reeds and plant motifs evoke the Nile River, its stability and permanence.

As with much other ancient architecture, the stone columns would've been covered with stucco and painted with vivid colors, that have since decayed and faded with time.

(TODO: add note about windows)

A Minoan priest-king ruled at the , a large multi-tiered complex surrounding a central north-south courtyard. This miniature city also had warehouses, temples, and residences with built-in ventilation and drainage. Stone walls were covered in mud / straw / plaster and painted with frescoes, and round tapered wooden columns were painted red with blue capitals. Like the Egyptians, the Minoans built a critical path entry sequence with specific views and symbols starting from the west porch, up a great stairway, and into a throne room.

800 BCE

Olmec, La Venta, Chavin de Huantar, Teopantecuanitlan

Zhou Dynasty China, Ritual Complex at Fengchu / Wangcheng

Babylon, Ishtar Gate

400 BCE

Classical Greece, Doric order transition from wood to stone inspired by Egypt... Temple of Apollo / temenos at Delphi... Ionic order is parallel, not after... Acropolis at Athens

Great Stupa at Sanchi

Temple of Horus, Xianyang Palace

0 CE

Rome... adapt greek forms, concrete, Vitruvius... Roman Urban Villa at Pompeii, Palace of Domitian at Palatine Hill, The Colosseum

Qin / Han Dynasty China

Teotihuacan

What is massing?

In architecture, massing is the overall feeling and logic of shape and space.

• Does a room feel large and heavy, or low and hidden, or light and open? Why?

Once you have prototyped, playtested, and polished your level, you should probably release it publicly.

You don't have to finish a project 100% to release it. You can release an alpha / beta version, or even just a short demo. Don't wait until something is completely perfect, because chances are, nothing will ever seem perfect enough. Plenty of designers and developers release unfinished projects -- some people even sell it, and their players love it!

On this page, we'll cover general best practices and norms for publicly presenting a custom level, map pack, mod, or standalone project.

How to document a level

What's a typology?

A typology is a layout design pattern, a class system that helps us think about layouts. It abstracts the layout -- it simplifies and generalizes the structure.

This page is about how to package a Quake map / mod release.

These rules and guidelines are based on how most Quake engines work, as well as general community etiquette and consensus developed over the past few decades.

Quake was made in 1996, its core technology is over 26 years old. And like any 26 year old, it's too late to change anything bad or annoying about them. We have to figure out how to live with it.

Folder and file names