What you’ll find here are just a bunch of videos, books, and articles I’ve stumbled upon over the years, that I have personally found useful in helping me become a better Level Designer; and I hope you find them as useful as well!
Level Design Resources
Game Makers Toolkit
GMTK is a fantastic resource for many things Game Design, Level Design and Game Development related. Mark Brown’s dozens of analysis videos offer brilliant perspectives and breakdowns of your favorite games and games you maybe haven’t heard of. The insights gleaned from these videos do nothing short of encouraging all devs to improve their craft.
Here are some of my favorites.
Why Nathan Drake Doesn’t Need a Compass
I love this video as it goes over some of my favorite aspects of level design, done at an expert level. Wayfinding and affordances. The tools of guiding a player through a space with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) clues; Movement, Sound, Composition, Shape language, Light, all these little touches just to make sure a player knows the direction they should be going without the aid of a compass or waypoint.
Invisible Tutorials
Continuing on the topic of guiding the player without explicitly telling them, I really enjoy this analysis of the Half Life 2’s tutorials. Mark Brown goes over how they teach the player through natural gameplay moments rather than words and popups. It offers itself as a perfect example for any developer to stop and think of how a player can learn through immersive gameplay moments rather than pulling them out of the experience to read tutorial text.
4 Step Level Design
This is a classic video I think all designers should familiarize themselves with. It discusses a structure that allows mechanics to be introduced, learned, mastered and then thrown away, keeping the experiences within the game fresh and versatile. More importantly I think this video and method highlight something crucial all designers should push themselves towards; and that’s being okay with throwing away ideas and finding creative unique solutions for your designs that help them stand out. The brilliant Coop game It Takes Two, takes this rule and made it one of their core principals, and you can feel it. With all the stand-alone mechanics they throw at you, it really makes every level unique and true to its theme. Mark Brown interviews one of the designers behind the Tree level here Making It Takes Two’s Best Level
Spatial Communication
This talk by Peter Field is by far one of the best videos on Level Design I’ve had the privilege of watching. Not only do they discuss their blockouts design intent, and the core level design fundamentals that went into it, but they do it live through play and demonstrate it in practice.
Being able to have an industry veteran talk through their processes and showcase the fundamentals at work provides such a wealth of knowledge that I find myself rewatching this every other month.
Last of Us - Level Design Breakdown
Peter Field takes us through one of the levels he had built for Last of Us, utilizing a real game example to showcase the processes and design intentions that led to this memorable level.
Dishonored 2 and Holistic Level Design
This is an updated and condensed version of the GDC talk Steve Lee gave on the same topic of Holistic Level Design. In this talk, they cover the importance of the relationships between Gameplay, Story and Presentation and how they work together to form intuitive clear immersive gameplay.
The topics discussed in this talk are incredibly important as they provide the principles to create levels with clear intentionality and examples of how to make sure the player stays informed, making clear choices. One of my favorite examples from these talks is the door the problem. An interactable door should look interactable at a glance, and one that is not, should read as blocked before the player gets to it, and that’s something I think a lot of games struggle with.
How I Design Levels in text first, and why
In this video Steve Lee gives us an excellent resource and the processes he uses when crafting levels.
You can’t get much better than having an industry veteran actually take you through building a level from documentation, into the level editor and doing real greyblocking and scripting.
GDC (Game Developers Conference)
GDC is a vault of game industry veterans talking about the learnings of their craft and presenting it to all to become better at what they do. There are videos for Game Design, Programming, Art, Level Design, Project management, and much more. This is an obvious win in terms of a robust resource.
Here are some of my favorites.
Ten Principles for Good Level Design
A great GDC talk by Dan Taylor in which they break down a set of principles to help you craft more innovative, engaging levels.
These principles at their core, seem incredibly obvious; especially when laid out and said out loud, but they can be incredibly challenging to implement. That’s why it’s important to remember and think on them while developing your levels and problem solving.
Level Design Workshop: Block Mesh and Lighting Tips.
A GDC talk by Naughty Dog and Respawn Developers where they discuss the the processes involved in creating level flow. In this talk they cover many of the important facets of Level Design during the block mesh phases such as, affordances, denying affordances, Shape Languages, Color Language, Landmarks, Leading Lines, composition, movement and may other CORE techniques all designers should utilize to create smooth player flow.
The Importance of Nothing: Using Negative Space in Level Design
In this GDC talk, Epic’s Jim Brown discusses the importance of negative space and its importance in design. Showing its applications of how negative space changes how players perceive the play spaces we design and offers insight to how we can use it to our advantage.