While level exploration is not an exact science, and every player behaves differently, there are general behaviour patterns that can be considered when designing a free-navigation level. Players tend to be attracted to areas they perceive as offering the greatest and most immediate reward.

In this example, the player needs to find and collect four boxes in any order. The question is: what path do you think they are most likely to take through the level?

The player has the following information:

1. What they can see

2. Their memory of previously visited areas

3. The knowledge that there are four boxes to find and collect

The player’s brain rewards them at two key moments: locating a box and collecting it. These are two separate rewards. Interestingly, locating a box but leaving it behind often gives a smaller sense of reward than the anticipation of finding and collecting another box that might be just around the corner.

Based on this, here’s a typical exploration path the player might take:

1. They see Box D clearly in the distance, with no mystery about its location. “Great, I know where that is.” But they don’t necessarily head straight towards it.

2. Instead, they decide to check the closest unexplored corner, immediately to their left, and find Box A. Great! It seems there might be boxes hidden around corners.

3. Remembering the more distant corner to the right, they backtrack and collect Box C.

4. With no further clues in sight, they now head towards the sure thing: Box D.

5. With all visible areas explored and no new clues, their brain switches to “search mode”.

6. Turning around, they notice something they hadn’t seen before: the skyline opens up between two generic buildings, revealing a path towards an unexplored area.

7. Following this path, they soon discover the fourth and final box, Box B.

This is not a rule, of course. Players will behave differently, and playtesting always wins. Even when players behave exactly as predicted, they usually represent only one segment of the bell curve, and you should not forget about the players elsewhere on that curve. But understanding these patterns is a useful tool for level design.

Mandatory video included after my last post was accused of being AI-generated. This is old, well-known content of mine, but apparently this is where we are now.

Level Design Tips

• 01 - The Building Pie

• 02 - The 5 Ingredients of Game Town Design

• 03 - Designing with Perspective: How Cameras Shape Levels

• 04 - Level Exploration: The Closest Unexplored Area in Sight

Hi there! My name is Chris, and this is my game Orbifold, a co-op FPS roguelike that takes place in spherical arenas. I've been developing it for a while now, and I've always wondered if there were any established level design principles that could be applied to this kind of space.

Many people comment (eg. in the replies to this post) that the game would be hard to balance for PvP, you'd be getting shot in the back or from above constantly. This is a fair point, but the game is actually PvE so I have some control over how the enemies behave - I could have them try to navigate in front of you before attacking, or telegraph their attacks with sound if attacking from behind or above. I can also control the number of enemies that try to attack from the other side of the sphere for balance.

I'm curious for your thoughts, both in how you'd design a level in this space for PvE but also for PvP, as a PvP mode is something we're considering for later!

When designing levels, the choice of camera system is a critical factor. It shapes not only the technical possibilities, but also the artistic direction and, most importantly, the player’s perception of the environment.

In the image, the same three urban elements, represented by differently coloured shops, are rearranged to show how spatial composition changes depending on the camera perspective.

Camera-Dependent Constraints and Opportunities in Level Design:

🎥 Top-down 2D

• Constraints: With only a limited number of surfaces properly facing the camera, composition is more restricted. This requires careful design to ensure that the environment remains clear and natural on screen.

• Opportunities: Top-down views allow for highly abstracted environments, where composition plays a key role in guiding the player. This perspective is especially useful for puzzle-based gameplay and minimalist design.

🎥 Isometric

• Constraints: The addition of depth introduces challenges with occlusion and visibility, particularly in complex, multi-layered environments.

• Opportunities: Isometric views offer a balance between abstraction and detail, making them perfect for supporting bold and stylistically strong art directions. This perspective allows for intricate, visually captivating spaces that guide player movement while maintaining a strong artistic identity.

🎥 Third-person

• Constraints: As a free camera system, third-person requires careful design and control to avoid disrupting the player’s experience. Mismanagement can lead to awkward angles, camera collisions, and missed cues.

• Opportunities: This perspective is possibly the most natural and immersive, extending the player's field of view to include surroundings that go beyond a fixed cone of vision. This allows for more expansive and creative use of visual cues, enhancing spatial awareness and making it ideal for exploration and action games

🎥 First-person

• Constraints: The narrow field of view can limit spatial awareness, requiring precise placement of visual cues to ensure they are not missed. Complex layouts or excessive verticality can easily disorient players.

• Opportunities: First-person views heighten immersion and place players directly inside the world. However, they demand careful environmental design to maintain navigational clarity and ensure key elements remain noticeable.

The camera system is not just a technical choice. It is a foundational element of level design that influences composition, navigation, pacing, and how the player perceives and interacts with the environment.

But there is one camera perspective missing from the image that holds a special place for me, and that I believe offers its own unique opportunities and challenges.

Can you guess which one it is?

—-

Level Design Tips

• 01 - The Building Pie

• 02 - The 5 Ingredients of Game Town Design

• 03 - Designing with Perspective: How Cameras Shape Levels

• 04 - Level Exploration: The Closest Unexplored Area in Sight

Hi! Following a recent discussion in this subreddit, I’m going to start posting some of my old level design tips material here.

Most of this already exists elsewhere, mostly from a couple of years ago and on other social networks, but I think it could help spark some discussion and bring more level design content into the subreddit.

I’ll start with around five posts like this, one every few days, and then maybe I’ll continue sharing older work, sketches, or small breakdowns. Some of you may already know this material. Most of my educational content is normally in Spanish, but if anyone is interested, it’s easy to find with a quick search.

This first one doen't really talk about creating spaces yet, but it introduces the concept of scale, readability and landmarks. It's the one that actually sparked the idea for the ld tip series, is about very simple building readability.

The first sketch is the basic idea:

1. Box

2. Box with holes

3. Building

It came from a conversation about how players recognize urban environments, even when the art style is very stylized, simplified, or cartoonish.

A plain box is not a building yet. A box with holes starts to suggest one, but it can still feel abstract, like a generic volume with windows. What usually makes it read as a building is the way we structure it into recognizable architectural parts.

That is where “The Building Pie” comes in.

It is a simple framework I use to think about buildings in urban game environments. Whats the least you need to think when crating a urban environment that it still reads as urban, buildings etc...

A - Street Level

The most important part for gameplay and player interaction. It defines entrances, shopfronts, doors, scale, cover, navigation, and the negative space of the street around it. In many games, this is the part the player actually reads and uses the most.

B - Floors

The repeated middle layers. They give the building rhythm, height, scale, and silhouette. Even if they are not interactive, they help the player understand what kind of building it is and how big the world feels.

C - Top

The crown of the building. It helps make the building recognizable from a distance and can also become an important gameplay surface, especially in games with rooftops, climbing, parkour, vantage points, objectives, or vertical navigation.

The useful thing, for me, is that with only these three elements you can make very simple buildings read clearly without relying on lots of detail.

This is especially helpful during blockout, stylized art direction, or early environment design, where you don’t want to solve everything with decoration.

When you design urban buildings for games, what do you prioritize first: ground floor interaction, silhouette, interior layout, navigation, or something else?

—-

Level Design Tips

• 01 - The Building Pie

• 02 - The 5 Ingredients of Game Town Design

• 03 - Designing with Perspective: How Cameras Shape Levels

• 04 - Level Exploration: The Closest Unexplored Area in Sight

Second post in this small revival of my old level design tips. The first one was about buildings. This one is about how to design towns. For this, I use Kevin Lynch’s 5 elements of the city, from The Image of the City. It is a foundational text for urban planners and architects, a must-read for anyone looking to build a solid background in urban design, and it translates surprisingly well to game towns.

The useful thing here is that it does not really tell you how to design a city. A real city has many more layers, systems, and complexities than a video game city. What it talks about is how people perceive, remember, understand, and navigate a city. That is what makes it so useful for us: how people build a mental map of a city. That's valuable for us. We want to design a place that players can read, remember, and move through. A memorable, navigable, and legible place.

These are the 5 city elements that translate incredibly well into 5 ingredients for designing a navigable town in a video game:

1. Path

The routes players take through the town: main streets, secondary streets, alleys, bridges, shortcuts, etc.
Not every path needs to be equally important. In fact, they usually should not be. Street hierarchy is one of the easiest ways to make a town easier to understand.
They should always be unmistakable and recognizable. (excluding secret paths and other rule-breaking for gameplay purposes)

2. Edge

The boundaries that define or separate areas: walls, rivers, fences, changes in elevation, coastline... anything linear that feels like a break.
Edges help players mentally break down a large space into smaller pieces. They tell you where one thing ends and another begins.
An edge is useful even when it is not a hard barrier. Sometimes it blocks movement, sometimes it only frames an area, and sometimes it simply tells the player they are entering a different kind of space.

3. District

The different areas of the town, each with its own identity, use, and visual language.
Ideally, if you drop the player somewhere inside the town, they should be able to know, at least, which district they are in. They should be that identifiable.
This is especially useful in games because players do not remember every street. They remember chunks of meaning: the market area, the industrial area, the old town, the rich district...
In video games it's also easier to explain: each district usually has its own set of art assets, buildings of different sizes or complexities, and spaces and streets with different shapes and scale. Sometimes even different music.

4. Node

The points where paths converge. Mechanically, in its most basic form, it's the point on a path where a player gets to make a decision, right or left, etc. This usually means it is where gameplay and points of interest naturally converge too: town squares, crossroads, important intersections...
Nodes are very useful for gameplay because they create attention. They help players understand where something important might happen, instead of making every building and every door feel equally important. It's very useful to generate hierarchy.

5. Landmark

The elements that stand out and help players orient themselves: towers, statues, or unique buildings visible from a distance, or anything memorable enough. A landmark can be a destination, but it can also simply be an orientation and navigation tool.

Can you identify the path, edge, district, node, and landmark elements in the drawing? And in any memorable city from a video game?

—-

Level Design Tips

• 01 - The Building Pie

• 02 - The 5 Ingredients of Game Town Design

• 03 - Designing with Perspective: How Cameras Shape Levels

• 04 - Level Exploration: The Closest Unexplored Area in Sight

This is supposed to be a Ukrainian town scarred by the war. Is this a good urban layout, something you’d see in Ukraine? I’d appreciate any advice and feedback, specially if you’re from Eastern Europe.

a bunch of us single player Quake 1 modders just released a "Rooftops Jam" (it has 19 maps! it's free: https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/rooftops-jam.647/ )... and I did a level design theory notes write-up of my own map, called "Mermaids In The Basement": https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2026/10/new-quake-map-mermaids-in-basement.html

making Quake maps has been teaching me so much about sight lines and encounter design, it's been a great experience, highly recommend everyone get into it IMO!!

Hey!

Just finished my level design project. The location is a quarry for a horde fight set in Days Gone universe. Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback or suggestions:)

You can also view on Artstation page and there's also a gameplay video if anyone's curious.

Cheers

Over the past year, I have been working solo on a Post-Soviet Hospital environment cluster in Unreal Engine 5. The latest completed section is the Kitchen Block, structured into 4 functional zones based on real-world sanitary workflows: Commercial Cooking Hall, Industrial Dishwashing Station, Service Corridor, and Dining Hall.

During development, I built a custom interior Lumen lighting pipeline without global Directional or Sky lights. I published an article on 80 Level detailing how this lighting setup handles noise reduction:

https://80.lv/articles/suppressing-noise-without-sacrificing-lighting-quality-when-using-unreal-engine-s-lumen

This completes the hospital environment project for now. While there are many other areas I could explore, such as the morgue, bomb shelter, wards, or surgery, I am considering an entirely new project that will require building a fresh pipeline. I will be transitioning to Blender to focus on modular destructible environments for military simulators.

Some Images with pork meat blocked by reddit. :/

High-res renders of the kitchen and other hospital quarters on ArtStation.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lEEwqk

This is supposed to be a war worn Ukrainian town. But I feel like it needs more realism… i want to make it look more realistic but keeping that atmosphere. I mostly mean lighting and materials or stuff.

Most every post around here is about environment art and not actual level design. Where’s the real LD subreddit with actual discussion and professionals at?

From Shadow to Light… Literally #DevDiary16

In this post, you're looking at the exact same room before and after our lighting pass. No changes to the models or textures, only adjustments to the light sources, their intensity, and their placement.

It's a highly technical part of game development, but the impact is immediate. The scene becomes easier to read, the atmosphere starts to take shape, and the environment feels much more believable. 😎

Which version do you prefer: before or after the lighting pass? 👀

And if you'd like to see how the rest of the project comes to light, don't forget to add MegaGum to your wishlist on Steam : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4111300/MegaGum/ !✨

I restarted the whole level and this time managed to get the lightning straight. I wanted something to fill that linearity so i added sinkholes or whatever. This is still very unfinished so things will mostly change and improve. But ig I could use some feedback on how this looks so far, I wanted for each sinkhole to have their own way of getting over but I would like more climbing. And I also need advice on performance because this level is currently giving me 30fps.

Hey! I’m Jiyan, the level designer on Undertaker, a gothic FPS being developed by a team of just three people.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on this massive interconnected map, slowly losing my sanity over every path, landmark and suspiciously placed rock haha. After many long days of work, almost the entire world is finally connected and playable!

Each biome has its own atmosphere, landmarks and gameplay identity, while still feeling like part of the same world. There’s still plenty of polishing left, but seeing the whole journey finally take shape feels incredibly rewarding.

Which area is your favorite?

This is in Unreal Engine 5, using a custom ALS.

Looking for improvements and advice on these type of levels.

There's also a lot of Doom influences as I'm used to map for it a lot.

Is it too bad? It also probably feels very abstract, but I'm not very worried in creating realistic rooms and with furniture and stuff.

I'm currently working on a Dark Souls III level, and a decent portion of my level takes place within a gothic city (ideally, it will be similar to Irithyll). I'm really struggling with how to design the critical path. I feel like many of the iterations I come up with feel very "video-gamey," meaning that the city feels like it's laid out solely for the player to get from point A to point B, if that makes sense.

I attached an image of my current iteration to show what I'm currently working with, fyi this is just the first pass, so there are essentially no details on the meshes right now (note the yellow line is a shortcut door that can only be opened from the back).

(Unreal Engine 5) This will be a survival tactical shooter, where you’ll investigate and infiltrate dark secrets of the government involving aliens.
I’m using the PCG spline tool for the forest, and the Ultra Dynamic Sky plugin for the weather. Any advice or ideas are appreciated. What are your thoughts??

Hey everyone - I was a senior level designer on Dishonored 2, and I've just released my latest youtube video, where I show the Half Life 2 level that I made for Arkane Studios' level design test.

It's 27mins long and very in-depth - I talk about everything from the brief and how I approached it, to layout design and structure, and how I used Half Life 2 to show my understanding of Arkane's design values (systemic gameplay, player intentionality, etc).

Hope people here enjoy it and find it useful / interesting! Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cEccZCPamA

I'm new to level design, and this is my first serious level sketch. I'm looking for feedback to improve. So I decided to post it here. I attach the sketch and a bit map, to visualize different sorts of activity are equally displaced in the level. Orange is horror, green is exploration, purple is a "wow" moment, red is action, and blue is calm moments.

I also attach photos with a detailed text - walkthrough.

I'm especially interested in feedback on:

pacing and progression

backtracking

boss encounter

environmental storytelling

whether the player is given enough information to understand where to go

The initial brief for this level was:

"Underwater Research Station"

Setting

Several kilometers below the surface lies a scientific research station.

During an experiment, an accident occurred.

Communication has been lost.

Most of the station's sections have shut down.

Water is beginning to leak inside.

The player is an engineer who has found himself as the only person left in this sector.

Player's Goal

Reach the central control room and restore power to the station.

Restrictions

The player starts with only:

a flashlight;

an adjustable wrench

a Level 1 access card.

There are no weapons at the beginning.

Level Requirements

The level must include:

at least 2 branching paths where the player has to choose which route to take;

1 short safe area where the player can take a break;

1 moment of surprise;

1 location that the player can see in advance but can only access later;

1 new tool or item that changes how the level can be navigated;

1 large final room where the main objective of the level takes place.

Thanks!

This is my first game project, and every detail is part of a learning process driven by passion and ambition.
these pictures just from 2 worlds level of 7 that will be in the game
so if there any something not right must edit to be professional
i will see your feedback and i truly appreciate it
i wish u all the best

During the night the ranks get filled with fan crowds of the 2 football teams. While during daytime the ranks have an empty yellow pattern at night there's a split between the crowds. During night you can use these cues to sort the pieces by crowd which is not possible during the day.

Hey folks. Drawing and aligning isometric art was becoming a massive bottleneck, so I built a custom Python engine that procedurally generates pen-and-paper style dungeons.

Instead of placing tiles by hand, the script uses Wave Function Collapse to build non-linear mazes and scatter props automatically. The ink lines are generated using Perlin noise math, ensuring every block snaps together on a strict isometric grid without seams. It also adds procedural wear-and-tear, like dirt in the corners and cobwebs.

The biggest time-saver is the export process. The engine bakes Normal Maps and light occluders on the fly. When imported into the game engine, the 2D textures react to dynamic lighting and cast shadows instantly.

Swipe through the gallery to see the raw layout, the tile details, and the final dynamically lit scene. What do you think of this visual style?