Level design and environment art

Level design decides what the player does in a space: where they go, what they can reach, where they fight and how they find their way. Environment art decides what that space looks like, what it is made of and what story it tells. On most projects the two overlap so much that the best results come from working together, but gameplay usually wins a conflict. Felix Leyendecker of id Software states: "gameplay and the playability of a space is always the highest priority" (80 Level: Environment Design: Modularity, Color &…).

This page maps both roles and points to the parts of the handbook each one needs. For the wider picture of jobs in game art, see roles in 3D game production.

#Two senses of "level design"

The Level Design Book separates the two roles: "Level designers focus on shaping player behavior. In contrast, an environment artist focuses more on graphics" (The Level Design Book: What is level design). It also notes that the term has two senses: a formal industrial sense of "Level Design" without environment art, and a broad common sense that "includes environment art", summed up in its principle that "anything that affects the game world is level design" (The Level Design Book: What is level design).

The book defines environment art as "the cosmetic decoration of a level or game world, while preserving its core functionality and gameplay" (The Level Design Book: Environment Art). It adds some history: "Before the 2000s, level designers often made their own environment art too", while today "a level designer is usually supposed to make as little visual art as possible" (The Level Design Book: Environment Art). On small teams the split blurs again: "level designers will likely have to source or make their own environment art, and vice versa" (The Level Design Book: Environment Art).

#Responsibilities in a shared space

The level designer's side is function. Typical concerns are layout and flow, movement metrics, encounter spaces, pacing and wayfinding. The main tool is the blockout: a playable draft built from simple shapes (Epic Developer Community documentation: Greyboxing in Unreal Editor for Fortnite).

The environment artist's side is appearance and meaning. Typical concerns are modular kits, materials, set dressing and art passes, lighting (often with lighting artists) and environmental storytelling. The main tool is the art pass that turns grey boxes into a believable place.

Neither side is purely technical or purely visual. Emilia Schatz, a lead game designer at Naughty Dog, writes about shape language and silhouettes, because the look of a ledge decides whether players know it is climbable (80 Level: Defining Environment Language for Video Games). Leyendecker, an environment artist, writes about colour as navigation (80 Level: Environment Design: Modularity, Color &…).

#Where the roles overlap

• Composition. Mateusz Piaskiewicz argues that "A level designers' work can be compared to that of a painter", with vistas planned like paintings (Game Developer: Composition in Level Design). Artists compose the same views. See composition and focal point.
• Readability and affordances. Schatz describes a "clear and consistent shape language" that tells players where they can climb or take cover (80 Level: Defining Environment Language for Video Games). Design sets the rules; art must follow them in every asset. See affordance and silhouette.
• Wayfinding and landmarks. Colour, light and big shapes guide players. See wayfinding, landmarks and colour for environments.
• Story. Layout implies history; props confirm it. See environmental storytelling and worldbuilding for artists.
• Interior logic. Dan Cox's GDC 2014 talk draws parallels between interior design and both level art and design (GDC Vault: What Modern Interior Design Teaches Us About…), a reminder that rooms need to make sense as places as well as gameplay spaces.

#How studios split the work

Two broad patterns appear in artist interviews.

Handoff. Level design builds a blockout; environment art dresses it. Leyendecker describes artists often receiving a "rough, simplistic blockout by level design which you have to stick to" (80 Level: Environment Design: Modularity, Color &…). This is efficient but risks layouts that are hard to make beautiful.

Collaboration. Leyendecker's advice is to "involve an artist in the level design/blockout process early on", with "back and forth between designers, 3D artists and concept artists" (80 Level: Environment Design: Modularity, Color &…). Epic's greyboxing guide also mentions material artists testing textures on greybox geometry (Epic Developer Community documentation: Greyboxing in Unreal Editor for Fortnite). Art-led previsualisation, such as Eddie Bennun's SketchUp-and-paintover workflow, can feed in from the other direction (The Gnomon Workshop: Environmental Storytelling: Composition and…).

Research describes both patterns. Tobias Karlsson, Jenny Brusk and Henrik Engström studied level design at two game studios of about 40 employees each, partly through four months of participant observation with the lead author working as a level designer (Karlsson et al. 2023). Their first finding is that "the process of level design is usually highly interdisciplinary", involving nearly every discipline even where only one or two were formally assigned to it (Karlsson et al. 2023). The two studios split the work differently:

• At the first studio, designers white-boxed the levels and artists added the visual narrative. The creative director observed that artists "are afraid of changing the white-boxed layout they received from the level designers", and a lighting artist asked for "a phase in between" for preliminary lighting and composition, because lighting was "one of the last things that are added" (Karlsson et al. 2023).
• At the second studio the level designer role did not exist: environment artists and game designers shared the work, and "the artists did not perform any white boxing, but rather built the levels with premade assets and rudimentary gameplay" (Karlsson et al. 2023).

The authors suggest "an interdisciplinary task force, dedicated specifically to level design", with a coordinator to synchronise the disciplines (Karlsson et al. 2023). They note the limits themselves: two fairly similar studios, and one manager as the only source at the second.

Who owns which decision is a question of team structure. Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop gives it a whole chapter ("Team Structures", chapter 12 of the 5th edition) (Fullerton 2024). Ulf Hagen's interviews with six Swedish game developers found that many studios deliberately design for player experience and use a range of tools to express that vision, so that "everyone in the development team" can make design choices that fit it (Hagen 2011). For a level, that shared vision is what lets a designer and an artist make compatible decisions without checking every change with each other.

#How this handbook serves each role

#Further reading and watching