World 4

Space

Level design: how a place teaches, leads and surprises without saying a word.

A level is an argument about where to go next, made entirely out of walls, light and distance. When players get lost, die to a sniper they could not have seen, or walk the same corridor six times, the cause is almost always in the layout, and a tutorial popup will not fix it. These words let you point at the layout and say what should change: move the landmark, break the sightline, drop a shortcut from room five back to the start.

Critical pathThe shortest route through a level or game that still gets you to the end, touching only what is required. The golden path is its richer cousin: the route designers hope most players take, past the things worth seeing.
LandmarkSomething big and unique that can be seen from far away, so players always know where they are relative to it. Lost people navigate by these in cities, and players do the same.
WeenieA big, tempting sight placed at the end of a route, so people walk towards it without being told. Walt Disney's term: Sleeping Beauty Castle at the end of Main Street is the first and most famous one.
BreadcrumbingA trail of small rewards or items, each in sight of the last, that leads the player along a route. The player only ever decides to get the next one.
SignpostingMarking what matters so that it stands out from everything else: a colour on every climbable ledge, a light over the correct door, one kind of crack on every wall that breaks. Players learn the code once and read it for the rest of the game.
FunnellingShaping a space so that people drift towards one place without noticing: walls that lean inward, a road that narrows, a floor that slopes down. They believe they chose the route.
GatingAnything that stops the player going further until they have done something. A hard gate cannot be passed at all. A soft gate can be, but it is dangerous or expensive to try early.
Lock and keyA gate that one specific thing opens. The key may be an actual key, or an ability that works as one: a hookshot, a double jump, a bomb.
Soft lockThe game is still running and you can still move, but you can no longer finish it, and it does not tell you. A hard lock is the frozen version, where nothing responds at all.
Teaching through level designArranging the first spaces so that the player works out the rules by bumping into them, safely, with no text. The obstacle comes first, in a place where failing costs nothing, and the lesson arrives as an idea of their own.
KishotenketsuA four-part structure from Chinese poetry and Japanese four-panel comics: introduce an idea, develop it, twist it, conclude. There is no conflict required. In a level, one mechanic gets those four beats and then the level ends.
Player metricsThe measurements of what the character can do: jump height, longest jump, run speed, how high a wall they can climb, how wide a door they fit through. Every level is built out of these numbers.
SightlineHow far and where a player can see, and be seen, from a given spot. In a shooter, a sightline is also a line of fire: if I can see you, I can hit you.
Choke pointA narrow place every attacker must pass through, so only a few of them can fight at once. Numbers stop counting: the side in the narrow place fights the front rank, not the army.
CoverAnything that stops bullets and that you can stand behind. Its height and spacing decide the rhythm of a fight: pop out, shoot, get back, move to the next piece.
Flanking routeA second way into a fight that comes at the enemy from the side or behind. It exists so that a defender can never watch everything at once.
VerticalityUsing height as part of the layout, so that where you stand up and down matters as much as where you stand across. Whoever is above sees more and has less exposed to them.
ArenaA space built for one fight: big enough to move around in, usually with exits closed until it ends. The room itself sets the terms, so you can't solve it by backing into the last corridor.
Encounter designChoosing which enemies, how many, where they start and when they arrive, for one fight in one space. The same six enemies can be trivial or terrifying depending on the mix.
BacktrackingSending the player back through a place they have already been. Done well, the place has changed or they have: new powers open new doors. Done badly, it is the same corridor again with nothing to do.
ShortcutA door, lift or ladder that links a far part of the level back to an earlier one, usually opened from the far side. Looping level design builds the whole map around these, so the level folds back on itself.
Hub and spokeA central place with levels or regions branching off it, so that the player returns to the middle and picks where to go next.
DensityHow much there is to do in a given stretch of ground, and how much empty ground lies between. The emptiness is negative space, and like the gap between notes in music, it is doing a job.
Set pieceA big, expensive moment built once for one place, often scripted, that the player will talk about afterwards: the building that falls down while you are in it.
VistaA wide view placed deliberately, usually after a tight space, so the world seems to open up all at once. Tunnels and cave mouths do half of the work, because the eye has just been starved of distance.
SecretsThings placed off the main route for people who look for them: a wall that is not a wall, a ledge you must think to jump to. Their value is in being found, which needs a hint fair enough to notice.