Level Design

The craft of building the spaces, challenges and pacing that players move through in a game. It covers layout, difficulty, flow, encounters, guidance and how the environment tells a story.

Building a level with simple placeholder shapes first, to test layout, scale and flow before art is added. Tools such as ProBuilder, TrenchBroom and Godot's CSG nodes support it.

LDtk and Tiled for 2D tile-based levels, TrenchBroom for brush-based 3D levels, and your engine's built-in editor, with tools such as ProBuilder, for most 3D work.

Use landmarks, lighting, colour, geometry and sound to draw attention, test with players who have not seen the level, and adjust. See The Level Design Book and GDC Vault talks.

A simplified representation of walkable areas that AI characters use for pathfinding. Recast Navigation is widely used, and Unity, Unreal and Godot include navigation systems.

Yes. Techniques such as wave function collapse and the methods in the Procedural Content Generation in Games book generate tilemaps and layouts, often with hand-authored rules. Designers still curate the results.

Watch new players without coaching, note where they get lost or stuck, and use heatmaps and analytics to find patterns. See the Game Design page for more on playtesting.

Links were checked in November 2026. Descriptions follow each source's own pages and are not rankings.