Level Design
I’ve worked as a level designer on a number of game projects. Between initial concepting, design documents, greyboxing, final polish and more, I have experience with every step of the level design process. Here’s some of the highlights of my work.
Ashwood Springs
Ashwood Springs was a solo project for a level design class in 2020. I started from an initial concept for a linear level in a single player first-person zombie shooter - inspired by deteriorating semiurban places, I envisioned a run-down mining town overwhelmed by hordes of the undead.
I had several key moments I wanted to incorporate into the level layout - crawling through a hastily-emptied motel, a run-down single-room church house, and a final approach to a massive industrialized crevasse marking the end of the level. With these in mind, I created my first-pass design document.
I implemented the level in Unreal Engine 4, utilizing the engine’s BSP brushes to construct building and street layouts, as well as a handful of props when my available asset libraries weren’t sufficient. Pre-defining fixed dimensions for hallways, doors, and roads helped immensely to quickly add buildings to the layout per the design document.
The greybox obviously wasn’t capturing the mood intended for the location, so I was quick to begin texturing the environment. Abandoned cars, damaged infrastructure, and other details contributed further to selling an already-neglected environment that had fallen even further into disrepair.
My biggest challenge on this project was a result of two intents at odds with each other. Grid-based roadways are designed to be inherently open and navigable, allowing drivers to get wherever they need; however, I was designing a linear first-person shooter level. I had to find ways to limit the player’s vision and navigation, creating artificial chokepoints along the critical path. I took inspiration from games like Left 4 Dead, ultimately utilizing riot barricades, wrecked vehicles, and downed telephone wires to block off irrelevant side passages.
The Cocoknight
While I wore many hats while working on The Cocoknight, designing the game’s levels was some of the most fun I had on the project. The team started with three high-level concepts for environments on our tropical islands - beach, mountain, and jungle - and decided each should be its own distinct level. From that starting point, I got to work.
I quickly started greyboxing in Unity to test layouts and iterate. Documentation was secondary in this case - as our only level designer, I was solely responsible for implementing level layouts and the placements of enemies and objectives. Still, I eventually wrote rough documents to ensure our environment artist had a good starting point when polishing each level.
The Cocoknight’s levels are simple but effective; they allow a degree of exploration to facilitate the “island explorer” fantasy while never becoming truly open-ended, keeping the play experience focused. Giving different areas in each level distinct visual identities further facilitated players’ ability to navigate each space.
Install Wizard
I joined the Install Wizard team several months into the game’s development, and was primarily responsible for two of the game’s levels. Much like on The Cocoknight, I was given top-down concepts for environments and took direction and feedback from the team, but I owned these levels from start to finish. I wrote documents, greyboxed, implemented the vast majority of art assets, and scripted level logic for gates, hazards, and other level-specific events.
In addition to these levels, I played an important role in Install Wizard’s overall level design philosophy. The initial team imagined the game as a dungeon crawler, but the vertical slice they had initially developed featured short, rapid-fire, arcade-style levels. From my earliest involvement, I championed larger, more complex levels that would involve exploration, backtracking, and secrets. This change was an overwhelming success - it deepened the play experience and made the game’s system of upgrades and abilities feel much more relevant.
This wasn’t without its own complications, however. Larger levels meant players were getting lost more frequently, and the pacing of combat encounters had to be changed significantly to properly pace each level. The visual design of the levels suffered, too - Install Wizard’s levels took the abstract concepts of software and translated them into physical spaces, meaning we had few real-world analogs to draw inspiration from. Making the larger spaces coherent and consistent was a significant challenge, and I’d try a wildly different approach given the opportunity to work on Install Wizard again.
