Let's Talk Level Design

Level design is one of the most important things in a video game. It's not only about how you separate different areas of your game, like individual levels or sections, but the order you present them, and what the levels (or sections) contain. If you don't have good level design, no one will play your game, no matter how good your mechanics are. You need great levels that should teach the player your mechanics, then let the player master them.

Context: I recently created a game called "The Escape Exam." It's a puzzle adventure game, similar to games like Adventure, Chip's Challenge, and basically every Legend of Zelda dungeon ever. I guess I should say that some things will be spoiled here, so go play the game if you want a fresh experience.

I first started by creating a list of mechanics found in my game. Everything your player will ever encounter should be on this list:

Excuse my franitc handwriting.

Next up, come up with a list of different combinations or extensions of your mechanics. For example, I had a button that you needed to press to open up a door. Well, a combination could be I need to hold the button down to keep the door open, and I do that using a moveable crate. This list can and should be mostly be used for brainstorming, you don't have to use every idea written here. Even if you haven't already programmed your mechanics to be combined in this way, write it down anyway!

More frantic writing!

The purpose of this list is to now start coming up with different levels or sections (in my game I have different rooms, so I'll use that from now on). Using our example above, I can have one room feature pushing that button to open a door, and the next room can require the button to be held by a crate. This leads us to one of the hardest parts of level design.

Don't overwhelm the player, and don't expect the player to know everything right away.

What do I mean by that? Well imagine that scenario above, with the button holding and the crate. What if the player has never seen the crate before? How should they know what it does or how it works? This is what I mean when I said you need levels that teach your player, then let them master the mechanic.

In my game, I stuck to this general flow:

One example of this is the ice section of the dungeon. I set up the rooms like this:

Above all else, you should have someone else play your game! As the developer, you already know all of the mechanics and how they work, so you know more than your player will. Let other people tell them if your levels are good sources of teaching the mechanic or not.

Once you have your mechanic combinations/alterations planned out, you need to find out what order you want to put them in. Generally this can be open to debate, but you want to introduce your simpiler mechanics at the start, and let them get more complex as your player begins to master your game. This is probably where you'll spend most of your time re-organizing your general flow of the game, as once you play your levels, you may decide that things need to be changed, added, or even removed.

Happy designing!

~Ryan D. Krause