World and levels › Level design
Blockout: a world of boxes
This lesson is about why a level is first built from plain gray boxes. You’ll see what a blockout is, why it stays plain on purpose and five ways to build one. Then comes the loop that turns it into a level: build, walk, change, walk again. In the demo you’ll fix a route that takes too long, the way level designers do in a blockout.
Why this matters
A level made of finished art is expensive to change. The Level Design Book, a free online handbook of level design, gives an example from an unnamed big studio. Moving a single rock there took about an hour and six steps through several programs. Gray boxes in the editor move in a second. And you can’t play a design document or a sketch on paper, but you can play a blockout.
Levels change a lot before a game comes out. The team behind Neon White released over 100 levels and threw away about twice as many. One level, Smackdown, was changed more than 50 times over three years. The handbook quotes this to show how much levels change, and changes cost least while a level is still made of plain shapes.