#Blocktober Day 4: Organic Blockouts Today’s POI is Elder Tree, one of the first major POIs I was responsible for as a contracted Level Designer on Project Kyzen, a Fortnite-inspired battle royale. One of the challenges with blocking out an organic environment is that you aren’t working with clean, square rooms. The terrain, vegetation, and natural landmarks all need to feel believable while still supporting gameplay. For Elder Tree, I started by establishing the macro shapes of the environment: the overall terrain, major elevation changes, paths, and the massive tree that would become the focal point of the POI. From there, I used blockout geometry to establish the playable spaces around those natural forms. I was thinking about sightlines, traversal, combat spaces, and how players would move through the POI before worrying about making the environment look pretty. The final environment eventually became much more organic, but the underlying layout started with some very simple shapes. Blockout isn't just for buildings and corridors. It’s how we figure out the structure of natural spaces too. Portfolio link: artstation.com/artwork/L4WL8… #LevelDesign #GameDev #BattleRoyale

#Blocktober DAY 5: Design Tools You don’t need a traditional game engine to practice level design. Tools like Halo Forge and the Far Cry Map Editor can be incredibly valuable because they give you a playable sandbox where you can build, test, and iterate without having to create an entire game from scratch. This is Wildcat, a Firefight map I built in Halo Infinite using Forge. The important thing isn’t the tool you use. It’s how you approach the design. Whether I’m working in Maya, Unreal, Unity, or an in-game editor like Forge, I still break my level down the same way: Where does the player enter? What is the intended flow? Where are the major gameplay spaces? What are the sightlines? Where is the cover? How does the player move between spaces? Where do encounters happen? What decisions do I want the player to make? Forge gives you a lot of the gameplay systems and assets up front, but that doesn’t mean you can skip the design process. You still need to understand the why behind the layout and be able to evaluate whether the space is actually accomplishing what you intended. A level designer’s fundamentals should transfer between tools. The software is just the medium. The design process is what matters. Portfolio link: zswellstudios.artstation.com… #LevelDesign #HaloInfinite #Forge #GameDev

#Blocktober DAY 6: PvP level design Multiplayer level design is less about telling players where to go and more about creating spaces that give players meaningful choices. This is Keep, an asymmetrical competitive map I built in UEFN. When designing multiplayer spaces, I’m constantly thinking about how the layout affects player decision-making: • Where can players move? • What routes can they take? • Where do sightlines open up or break? • Which positions are strong, and how can players challenge them? • Where can players flank, retreat, or reposition? • How does the space change when multiple players occupy it? • Are there enough options to prevent every engagement from playing out the same way? One of the biggest differences between single-player and multiplayer design is that you can’t fully control the player’s experience. In a singleplayer level, I can carefully script the player’s progression and anticipate what they’ll see next. In multiplayer, players are constantly disrupting those expectations. That means the level needs to provide options rather than answers. A good multiplayer map gives players enough information and space to make their own decisions, while still creating situations where those decisions have consequences. That’s why iteration is so important. A layout that looks great on paper might become congested once multiple players are moving through it. A strong position might become too dominant. A route that seemed useful might never actually get used. You’re not designing a path through the level. You’re designing the conditions for players to create their own paths. Portfolio link: zswellstudios.artstation.com… #LevelDesign #GameDev #UEFN #Fortnite #Multiplayer

#Blocktober DAY 7: Story telling in Design A level can tell a story without a single line of dialogue. One of the biggest things I learned about environmental storytelling came from one of my first experiences working in the industry. This is a Proto-Drake nest POI I worked on for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight while I was an intern at Blizzard. At the time, I was still learning what it actually meant to build spaces for a professional game. I knew the basics of level design, but working on a real shipped project taught me how much storytelling can happen through the environment itself. Regardless of its size. As I built the space, I learned how to start thinking beyond simply placing geometry and creating a playable layout. I started thinking of the following: • Who lives here? • How would they use this space? • What would they leave behind? • What happened here before the player arrived? • How can the environment communicate scale and purpose? • How can props, terrain, and composition reinforce the story? This was my first real taste of set dressing and environmental storytelling as part of level design, and it completely changed how I approached building spaces. The environment isn’t just the backdrop for the gameplay. The environment is part of the storytelling. A path can tell you where something has traveled. A collection of objects can tell you how a space is used. Damage can tell you what happened there. The placement and scale of objects can tell you who or what occupies the space. And sometimes, the best storytelling is the stuff the player never consciously notices. That was one of the biggest lessons I took away from working on Dragonflight: good environmental storytelling doesn’t always tell the player a story. It gives them enough information to put the story together themselves. Portfolio link: artstation.com/artwork/14JB4… #LevelDesign #GameDev #WorldOfWarcraft #Dragonflight #EnvironmentalStorytelling