Level design is one of my major areas of interest. I've designed the levels for every game I've taken part in designing so far, and I am interested in learning more about level design as I continue to pursue a career in games. I am primarily interested in designing levels for puzzles and combat, but I am also interested in narrative level design.

Below are some level design documents I made for one of my first games, "Food Fight!" The challenge for "Food Fight!" was to introduce the player to different mechanics as the player progressed through increasingly difficult levels.

For some quick background: the goal of the game is to score points by throwing food at people and objects while avoiding being caught in the act by the lunch lady. I wanted the player to only have to contend with one hazard in level 1, and that is the lunch lady. As such, the cafeteria is filled with objects that the player can hit without having to worry about the consequences that come with hitting another student (more on that later). The objects were placed on various tables around the cafeteria to give the player variable levels of difficulty for hitting them: objects directly across from you are easy to hit, but objects that are far away or at an angle are more difficult to hit.

Level 2 introduces a new target for players that my team called "whiny enemies." These enemies, though worth a lot of points to hit, will tattle on you to the lunch lady when hit and increase her suspicion meter and force you to play cautiously until her suspicion level drops. Again, I tried to account for the difficulty of hitting the various targets: the target directly across from the player had objects in his way and therefore was more difficult to hit, whereas targets that had fewer objects between them and the player were easier targets.

Finally, in level 3 we added two new concepts: aggressive enemies and one-time-use projectiles. Aggressive enemies will throw food back at you after being hit, and if you're hit by food three times before you hit them three times, you lose the round. The aggressive enemies were placed across from the player so that the player can see the lunch lady and balance the need to throw food at the enemy characters with the need to avoid being seen throwing food. This level also introduced the dodge ability that players can use to avoid being hit by thrown food, though this does not impact any interactions with the lunch lady. The one-time-use projectiles would be used to do a special effect shot: our idea was that the player could throw a cream pie at a table and it could be used as an AoE attack that would knock everything off the table, but we ultimately decided to not put this in the game in order to focus more on the food fights with aggressive enemies which after playtesting was clearly the most fun part of the game.