#design process

From lines on paper to a space you can actually feel This is where vision turns real.

Shifting levels to break the monotony of a flat walkway. 📐🌊

When you’re designing entirely over water, a simple path can easily become boring. In this sketch for the lagoon masterplan, I’m experimenting with a split-level boardwalk system to deliberately disrupt the pace of movement and create distinct spatial experiences.

Dropping down brings you right to the water's edge,closer to the boats and the splash of the tide. Stepping up lifts you into the shade of the tree canopy, giving you a wider view of the horizon. It’s a simple shift in altitude, but it completely changes how you interact with the landscape as you walk through the cluster.

These sketches originated from mapping daily routines observed in Thulusdhoo. Areas of movement, gathering, and recurring activity were identified to understand where environmental encounters naturally occur. The overlapping of these nodes became the starting point for the project's spatial organization and conceptual direction.

Finding the geometry for the lagoon modules. I wanted to move away from rigid boxes and explore these fluid, organic forms that respond directly to the climate. It’s all about creating a sequence of experiences: pinching the entry to create a "compressed zone," forcing a deliberate pause, and then letting the interior gradually open up entirely to the water's edge.

Spatially, the lower floor handles the heavier, communal programs (workspaces, kitchen, hydroponics), while the upper level transitions into something more intimate, shielded by a screen facade to keep out the harsh tropical sun.

Still refining the thresholds, but loving how the structural rhythm is coming together.

(Swanfreckle will be excluded since I don’t change her design like at all)

Let's remember that one major goal in game design is to keep players within the flow band. If things are too easy, the experience becomes boring. If things are too difficult, the experience becomes frustrating. We need to keep the player experience between these two major goalposts or players will quit playing the game. As such, we have more wiggle room with single player than multiplayer content, but we still have to do a balance pass to make sure that the single player build options don't fall into boredom or frustration for most of our player experience. Different single player choices/specs/builds/etc. can be notably and visibly stronger or weaker than each other, but they cannot be boring or frustrating or too many players will drop the game and not come back.

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Oh, this is a good one.

The first Mass Effect famously made players wait in elevators while assets streamed in. There were a lot of elevator-specific conversations that triggered in that game.

When I did some level design on a game (that eventually got cancelled for other reasons), I would often have to construct narrow hallways between larger areas that required a player to enter on one closed door and be unable to see the next area from the entrance so that the game could stream in the assets for the next area. We called them "decomps", short for "decompression chamber".

There was a Tiger Woods Golf game (Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour Golf) that famously got recalled for padding their disc with a South Park episode so that the game data was closer to the outer ring of the disc and would thus be read faster by the device laser.

We will also hide many loading sessions with cutscenes and cinematics. While the cinematic is playing (with camera angles carefully chosen, visual effects constrained, and timing controlled), we can load the next gameplay area without the player noticing.

Many environment designs will feature a short dropoff in the geometry after navigating through a play area. Most players will never look back, but the dropoff exists to stop players from backtracking to the previously explored area. Once the player passes the dropoff, it is safe to unload the previous environment since the player can't easily go back.

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Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky

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