Practical Game Design

The level design process

As we already know from the opening paragraphs, level design can span a variety of tasks, from defining enemy spawn patterns to creating puzzles, sculpting, and populating an environment or even defining beat-maps in music games. Nevertheless, there are some processes and steps that can be applied to almost any content creation task, be it in part or as a whole. These steps are as follows:

1. The premise: Setting up a high-level vision
2. The sketch: Expanding upon the design
3. Grayboxing: Implementing and iterating on gameplay
4. Art implementing: Dressing up your creation
5. Final polish: Bug fixing and final adjustments before release

Let's go through all of them in detail and explore some examples!