Level Design

We can define game design in many different ways, but maybe one of the simplest definitions is "motivating the player to take certain actions." In that case level design can be defined as "motivating the player to take certain actions via the environment where a player character exists." The role of a level designer is to reinforce the game mechanics within the gaming environment.

Note: A game's user interface (UI) usually does not exist within the game environment and therefore is not a tool of the level designer.

Career Paths

Level design started to become a term in the industry in the early 90s with games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. At this time level designers were just software engineers who's job included creating the layout of the locations, level lighting, design encounters, and introduce new mechanics. If you are working on a game by yourself, you still need to do all of these things, but we have more helpful tools. At a larger studio these jobs are split into separate careers/positions. Here are a few of them:

Level Designer: responsible for how players actually play within a level, instead of the appearance of a level. (However, this separation doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t, for example, work on lighting or bake navigation; all this is still necessary, but only in order for the location to be playable, and to be playable as the designer intended.)
Lighting Artist: configure the lighting, even incorporating artistic and cinematic lighting
Level Artist: assembles a location from ready-made assets. That is, they literally dress a blockout in the production ready content
Concept Artist: work with ideas and help visualize them. Concept Artists mainly produce 2D art, which can depict many iterations of ideas for a game, from characters to locations. Their work can be iterated much faster and will be less expensive compared to doing everything with “working” content.
Environment Artist: produces materials, static meshes, etc.
Encounter Designer: designing fights and combat encounters. They work deeper with enemies’ AI and soemtimes cutscenes.

Work Artifacts

The Design - The most important artifact that a level designer creates is the design itself. The design is a drawing either done on paper or with digitial software. This is not an implementation within a game engine. here is an example from the game Shadow Complex which is a metroidvania style game.

Here we can see colors used to mark different level gameplay mechanics. In some places there are demarcations on zones and screens. There are even some parts that are still in-progress (the crossed-out piece of a location in the corner). Having obtained such a document, I would calmly start mechanically implementing this design into the game — without the need to simultaneously design and assemble anything.

Blockout - After a level designer has created the design and it is approved, the next stage is the blockout. This is a playable prototype.

A blockout can be played according to the rules of the game
play area lighting is clear (no exceedingly bright or dark areas)
doesn't have production ready art assets
primitive geometry that can be quickly iterated
clear, understandable navigation and landmarks
critical path vs. side path clearly defined

Here is a blockout by designer Alexander Leontiev. It is a blockout he created specifically for interviews:

This is a great example of a blockout:

It’s a top-down view — orthogonal projection, where we can evaluate the layout of the location: how obstacles are placed, how the lines are built, the paths a player can take, and so on
It has a division into separate floors like a “layer cake”
There are also text descriptions available

This example is missing key frame shots from the player's perspective. The way a level looks from a player perspective may be quite different than we think from a top-down view.

Here are some more examples from level designer Amin Montazeri. They often publicly share their work.

Here is an example of a transition from blockout to final location:

After the blockout stage, level designers will create a Level Design Document (LDD). This document will contain the original design, pictures of the blockout, and the other information/documentation of the level. Obviously there is a lot more work to go to get to the final level, which brings us to the question where does a level designer's responsibility end and the artists' begin?

Level Design vs. Art

Max Pierce, a level designer who worked on The Division and Cyberpunk 2077 and has written a couple of books on design describes level design this way, "It doesn't need to look beautiful, stunning, or anything like that. We make it functional."

Here is an example of Flappy Bird. (Note both of these were finished on the same day.)

Here are some examples of a level designer's work, and what it looks like after the level artist does their pass:

Grayboxes and Whiteboxes

Blockouts are generally divided into grayboxes and whiteboxes.

Grayboxes consist of level blocking without any art at all — or more specifically, without any of the signature elements that would clearly broadcast that, for instance, this is a house, and this is a rock. This model gives a lot of room for the art department’s imagination to take flight. As you might guess, above Destiny 2 provides us with an example of a graybox. That is, the most abstract block that serves to quickly and efficiently change the layout of the location as needed. Of course, spatial thinking skills are required for people who will further work with this. If you want to change locations efficiently in terms of time and resources, you will have to do it on grayboxes.

There are also whiteboxes. There are projects where whiteboxes are requested right away, and there are those where a whitebox is implemented as a subsequent step. This consists of blocking with key art — and even if there are no art assets, there is at least a silhouette that tells us something about a place we are playing in.

For example, in the case of Uncharted above, there are no art assets, but the level designer has already created a tree, a tunnel, and made the water flow like a waterfall. Everything is pretty clear. Looking over such a blockout, I would have no questions regarding the environment and the events happening within it.

A whitebox with art assets is seen in the Call of Duty example. There are already wagons, arches, and these aren’t going to change much during the art pass stage. (But passes and, in general, pipelines of interaction between different departments, are a completely different story, which we will talk about next time.)

Here is a video of exploring some early blockouts from Dark Souls:

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