Activity · Level Design
Bad Level Challenge
Diagnose a deliberately poor layout, rank the problems and improve the smallest part that would make the biggest difference.
What learners need
- A tutor-made bad layout as a top-down plan, Dungeon Scrawl map or simple engine blockout
- Pens or annotation tools
- A player goal and basic movement rules
Instructions
- Play or trace the intended route once without discussion.
- Mark places where the player is likely to get lost, bored, trapped or shown information too late.
- Rank the three most important problems by their effect on play, not by how ugly they look.
- Change one section of the plan or blockout and explain the expected behaviour change.
- Swap with another group and test whether the change actually helps.
Adapt it by level
Use a single-route plan with obvious scale or dead-end problems and picture-based prompts.
Add one optional route and ask learners to separate navigation issues from visual polish.
Include competing landmarks, pacing issues and an encounter that lacks a safe preview.
Make goals conflict and require the redesign to be justified against observed player behaviour.
What it develops
- Spatial reasoning
- Prioritised critique
- Iteration
- Playtest observation
What you can look for: The group can connect a specific layout change to an expected player behaviour and then test that claim.
Keep moving
Useful next steps.
Greybox before art
Use simple geometry to test scale, route and timing while changes are still cheap.
Teaching player flow without objective arrows
A practical sequence for showing how composition, contrast, landmarks and space guide attention.
Unreal Level Designer Quick Start
Epic's practical introduction to viewport navigation, levels, actors, basic geometry, lighting and playtesting.