mostly involves scrawling wildly down on a paint.net canvas to figure out what "the jist" of a level is meant to look like.
I've been working with Inkle on A Highland Song for almost four months now, and that's four months of figuring out how, exactly, one does level design. A lot of level design theory I follow right now speaks to the importance of "writing down" your level progression before putting hand to paper (or, uh, Unity). But despite being a writer for a half-bloody-decade, I need to be able to -see- the shape of the world I'm making. I'm visual-minded, like that.
Given half of the game was laid down by Jon before me, a lot of my early level design meant figuring out the core of what his levels were trying to accomplish: specifically, what peaks should be in level X or Y. Each Peak is basically it's own micro-level, after all - it has its own ascent, platforming, narrative and scripted puzzle, entries, exits, and maybe even a rhythmic "music run" segment along the way. Each peak should be its own complete narrative.
I still do a lot of the actual moment-to-moment design within the editor. Sketches and plans let me control the top-level pacing, but I need to be able to feel out how the platforming is working, find interesting new shapes to traverse, figure out new ways to play with our verbs and wrangle depth through z-layers.
But this is still my first, real design job in a long, long time! I'm still figuring out my own processes, what works for me, what works for the project. Highland's a very exciting game to work on, and if I'm gonna be using this site more often, I reckon it's a fair place to share my excitement as I help shape it into something truly special.
