How do you design your game levels?

I am curious about how other people go about designing levels for video games.
What is your workflow and process to design your levels?
How do you test for difficulty?
How do you brainstorm new ideas and avoid "writers block?"
Do you have any levels that you are particularly proud of?

 

I have only one published game so grain of salt, but...

That's going to depend heavily on the game. But with most things, you want to identify the core elements, block them in, test as far as you can go before putting anything else in.

For difficulty I just tune it to be fun for myself to play. That usually means it will be way to hard for average first timer. I just try to guess what I expect my core audience will be able to handle and go from there. I try to make games for an audience like myself, so I usually try to make it challenging enough to keep you engaged, but I don't like restarting too many times or save scumming.

New ideas? I don't understand how anybody has writers block. The easiest thing in the world is to come up with an idea. The big problem is I will die before I bring a quarter of them to life.

Level 6 in To Battle: Hell's Crusade is my favorite because after watching a few youtubers/twitchers play through it, it accomplished exactly what I wanted it to do. It's a simple castle defense map in turn based game. Enemies come in waves. But you don't know what the timer is - I wanted it to feel tense. I wanted players to feel like it was a desperate defense and feel like they are doomed less than half way into the battle -- but not so doomed that they give up. I think that was accomplished pretty closely, at least for the gamers I got to watch.

 

hey where do i found the download link of above game?

 

there in my signature, games: To Battle!: Hell's Crusade

 

I do everything without texturing on lighting first, then playtest it a few times. Any place I get hung up or miss a jump, I tweak to make the whole thing flow smoothly if I speedrun it. Then I add enemies during play testing to adjust difficulty. I use Halo as my reference as to what the different difficulties should be. I play easy mode until I can basically just walk through it with the weakest weapon. For the hard difficulty, I make it so that I struggle, but never actually die. The normal mode, I just put in the middle. I also have a super hard mode akin to DOOMs nightmare mode, where I make it so that even I struggle to get through the level.

while I’m tuning the firefights, I may occasionally alter the geometry to allow more or less room to maneuver. This is why I do absolutely zero graphics until the gameplay is perfect. Not having to worry about the UVs changing, or lighting to rebake allows me to iterate very quickly.