Level Design

Since Chapter 5, Line Traces, related to our dodgeball game, we've added quite a few game mechanics and gameplay opportunities, as well as some audio-visual elements, all of which were handled in this chapter. Now that we have all these game elements, we must bring them together into a level that can be played from start to finish by the player. To do that, let's learn a bit about Level Design and level blockouts.

Level Design is a specific Game Design discipline that focuses on building levels in a game. The goal of a Level Designer is to make a level that is fun to play, introduces new gameplay concepts to the player by using the game mechanics built for that game, contains good pacing (a good balance of action-packed and relaxed gameplay sequences), and much more.

To test the structure of a level, Level Designers will first build what is called a level blockout. This is a very simple and boiled down version of the level that uses most of the elements...