Skip to main content
GameDev.net gamedev.net

Level Design News

The latest Level Design coverage curated for game developers.

Control Resonant | Critical Consensus

GamesIndustry.biz reports that Control Resonant is landing well critically despite Remedy’s biggest swing yet: a melee-first, open-ended take on Control set in a paranatural Manhattan. Early reviews point to an …

News GamesIndustry.biz · 1 day, 18 hours ago
How Remedies Shape Progression in Hela: Of Mice & Magic

XBox Wire says Hela: Of Mice & Magic will launch on December 1, 2026 and hit Xbox Game Pass on day one. The co-op adventure centers progression on interactive brewing, …

Official XBox Wire · 1 day, 18 hours ago
Remedy's Arhi Makkonen on designing the "biggest world we have ever done" for Control Resonant

GamesIndustry.biz details how Remedy is rethinking Control Resonant around Manhattan’s open streets, with senior level designer Arhi Makkonen calling it the studio’s biggest world yet. The sequel also shifts to …

News GamesIndustry.biz · 3 days ago
Open vs Linear | Setting the Stakes Early On in The Outer Worlds 2

GDC Festival of Gaming highlights how The Outer Worlds 2 opens with a tightly scripted level instead of dropping players into a broad sandbox. The goal is to establish stakes, …

Video GDC Festival of Gaming · 4 days, 18 hours ago
Gears of War: E-Day Campaign – Brotherhood and Hope in a Hopeless World | Official XBOX Podcast

The Coalition is framing Gears of War: E-Day as a city-scale invasion story set in Kalona, where Marcus and Dom witness the Locust attack for the first time. The team …

Official XBox Wire · 2 weeks, 1 day ago
Hole in Zero?! Designing for the Absurd in Golftacular!

Golftacular! lands today on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC with a design built around “cheating” at mini golf. Both Good Games turned course frustrations into items like Early …

Official XBox Wire · 2 weeks, 5 days ago
City Sample gets a major update with PCG and Unreal MCP workflows

Unreal Engine 5.8 brings a major refresh to City Sample, adding entirely new levels built around recent engine features. The update also folds in PCG and Unreal MCP workflows, giving …

Official Unreal Engine · 3 weeks, 3 days ago
Designing POIs (Points of Interest) for 'The Outer Worlds 2' Clip #1

GDC Festival of Gaming spotlights how Obsidian Entertainment is building points of interest for The Outer Worlds 2. Staff area designer Dan Qiao breaks down the process behind POI design, …

Video GDC Festival of Gaming · 3 weeks, 4 days ago
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 – Inside the Maps and Movement of Multiplayer

Modern Warfare 4 is pushing Multiplayer toward faster, more readable combat by trimming cover, adding new traversal, and building maps around South Korea. Infinity Ward is pairing photogrammetry-driven art with …

Official XBox Wire · 4 weeks, 1 day ago
Modern Warfare 4 Multiplayer: Movement, Gunplay, Modes, & Maps

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is leaning hard into multiplayer feel, with a focus on movement, gunplay, modes, and map design. For developers, the interesting part is how the …

Official XBox Wire · 4 weeks, 1 day ago
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy – Why This Is Far More Than A Plague Tale 3

Asobo is taking A Plague Tale in a new direction with Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, shifting from stealth to combat-heavy action-adventure. The game stars Sophia, is set 15 years …

Official XBox Wire · 4 weeks, 2 days ago
How The Sinking City 2 Shifts to Survival Horror While Keeping Its Investigation Roots

Frogwares has launched The Sinking City 2 on Xbox Series X|S, pivoting the sequel from open-world detective work toward tighter survival horror. The game keeps investigation as an optional reward …

Official XBox Wire · 1 month ago
City Kit (Roads)

Kenney.nl has expanded its free CC0 City Kit with a Roads pack aimed at quickly building believable urban layouts. The bundle includes 90 files and has already seen updates for …

Official Kenney.nl · 1 month ago
Building a data-driven board to power Sente’s six-player strategy

Unity details how Oxobox Games built Sente around a data-driven hex board and simultaneous six-player turns. The studio stores every board as a logical model, then uses that same data …

Official Unity · 1 month, 1 week ago
New official 30th anniversary Quake mission pack adds new maps and mechanics

Ars Technica reports that Bethesda has marked Quake’s 30th anniversary with Dawn of the Machine, a new official campaign chapter for the original shooter. Built by MachineGames with id Software, …

News Ars Technica · 1 month, 1 week ago
How a Bucket Full of Pink Cow Dung Became an Item in The Immortal John Triptych

A single scene-patching problem in Death of the Reprobate snowballed into a puzzle built around a bucket of pink cow dung. Joe Richardson needed a dead end, then a prop …

Official XBox Wire · 1 month, 2 weeks ago
How to reimagine a classic sports game for a new generation with level design, worldbuilding, and VFX

Unity details how Mega Cat Studios is rebuilding Backyard Baseball in 3D with readability, worldbuilding, and reactive VFX front and center. The team kept the classic field layouts intact, then …

Official Unity · 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Text2Villa: Hierarchical Generation of 3D Indoor Environments with Physics-Aware Analysis-by-Synthesis

Text2Villa tackles a hard problem for 3D content pipelines: turning text into multi-room indoor spaces that stay physically plausible. The system combines a hierarchical layout generator with physics-aware scene assembly …

Research arXiv cs.GR · 1 month, 4 weeks ago
ThinkBLOX: 3D Indoor Scene Generation with Progressive Reasoning

ThinkBLOX is a new VLM-driven pipeline for generating 3D indoor scenes through progressive reasoning instead of one-shot layout planning. It iteratively places and refines objects, aiming to reduce the awkward …

Research arXiv cs.GR · 2 months ago
Meaningful Reasons to Wander - Ghost of Yotei Clip #1

Sucker Punch is highlighting three early-game lessons in Ghost of Yotei: give players a reason to wander, teach the world through play, and front-load the experience with intent. Adriana Martinez’s …

Video GDC Festival of Gaming · 2 months ago
Page 1 of 2 Next