Welcome to Developer Diaries! This is an ongoing series where a member of the Twirlbound team shares insight on how we build our games and reveals some of what goes on behind the scenes in our projects.
Hi, I’m Sasha, a designer at Twirlbound focused on level design and worldbuilding. In addition, I am a Women In Games ambassador and a multiple time speaker at industry events. I am also a dog mom to Pepper, one of our office dogs, who I got almost 3 years ago and has been with us for half of the development on The Knighting. At this point, she is an honorary member of the team.
Twirlbound was my first industry role out of university, where my expertise was primarily in level design. When I joined, I didn’t have much experience with worldbuilding or in making open world games. However, after working at Twirlbound for almost 5 years now, I was able to learn a lot through my familiar role of level designer, while also being encouraged to look through the lens of a worldbuilder. You see, at Twirlbound, the approach to building spaces is very world-centric; you think of the stories of spaces and their purpose before narrowing into what the gameplay and content looks like in that space. From my previous experience at university, this is backwards to what you’re taught as a level designer, which is to determine your gameplay blocks first and then flesh out the space around it. That being said, level design and worldbuilding are two sides of the same coin, they just have different considerations.
As a level designer, my job is to show the player where to go, how to get there, and to provide some additional interesting things along their path. To do this, I start by creating terrain and placing down my largest shapes first, usually landmarks. By placing down all my known landmarks, I’m able to ensure their visibility throughout the terrain and from the other landmarks. From there I can break up sightlines by building supporting structures, like settlements, around them. At this stage, my priority is to break up the straight path from one landmark to the other, and present additional routes the player can take. This is also usually where content like quest givers and simple interactions exist. After that, the last step is to determine the high traffic paths throughout the space due to its straightforwardness between landmarks and quests and trying to fill noticeable gaps and dead space with side content.
However, as a worldbuilder, there are additional considerations that are usually taken alongside those of level design, the goal of which is to provide context to the spaces built: what purpose does this space exist for? Who inhabits this space? Does the existence of this space make sense with the surrounding resources available to its inhabitants? For example, a cabin made of logs in the desert for a florist doesn’t make much sense. Though it may sound easy to answer these questions and create spaces to tell a story, it can be difficult to create a believable world. Telling the story of characters in a space is different than showing how the character might use the space day to day. Worldbuilding is also not just the responsibility of level design, but also narrative design, concept art, character art, and environmental art. It’s a team-wide feat.
Lastly, there’s a lot of work that people don’t get to see, especially in level design. I iterate on spaces quite frequently when new mechanics, systems, assets, tools, or feedback come in. But as changes get made and new things get introduced, those iteration phases get longer and longer. I usually label this as “maintenance”. For example, if I build a blockout or “rough draft” of a space that starts out as a platforming section, over time a quest, rewards like pickups and chests, and newer world ingredients might get introduced. Now, each iteration is not just about adjusting that initial platforming section, but also adjusting all those new introductions that involve the work of my peers like the narrative and economy designers.
So being a level designer/worldbuilder is a very interdisciplinary role that really depends on the work of others to make it come together into a full experience for the player. It has its challenging moments, but is very rewarding. I especially felt this while working on The Outskirts region and its city, Clesseia, for The Knightling.
When I joined Twirlbound and started work on The Knightling, there was already a strong narrative in place. I knew who the Knightling was and what the main story beats of the game were. It was also known that The Outskirts would be the first region of the game, so it became clear that the purpose of the region should be, to have the player explore and experiment with the core game loop. We wanted to keep it friendly, engaging, and safe for the player to do so and to just be able to have fun getting to learn the shield mechanics.
The city was planned to be the central hub, the area that was going to be the most visited with all the shops and vendors along with the connections to all the surrounding regions. That meant that gating content and access to the other regions was going to be a priority to keep the city feeling fresh with each visit throughout the story.
Clesseia was definitely my biggest challenge while working on The Knightling, as it was also my first level design task at Twirlbound. Since it was the first thing I worked on, I didn’t yet understand the scope of what was possible and there was definitely some scope creep. For example, the city used to be a quarter larger than what we shipped. The left side of Clesseia that connected to our third region, the Cornered Bosk, used to have additional housing, vendors, and at the top the Fortune Teller (which in the shipped version sits underneath the bridge). However, throughout development we noticed that we didn’t need to revisit the city as frequently as we had anticipated, and we included vendors in settlements outside of the city in the regions.
Cutting content of this scale sounds scary, but it encourages reflection. It gave us the opportunity to reevaluate what is supporting the gameplay and story, and what is potentially taking away from it. Since condensing the city led to a better overall player experience, we decided to cut that area to the left side of Clesseia, which also granted the added bonus on saving development time on set-dressing for environmental artists, and creating and placing content for designers.
In development, there are a lot of things you think you know and have experience in before each project. However, with each project comes new lessons and takeaways along with potential new skills. Something that level design and worldbuilding has taught me that has brought me comfort is that it’s not about that initial blockout, it’s about the decisions and pivots you make with each iteration. The initial blockout/concept/idea isn’t what makes you a great developer, it’s reflection and meaningful improvements that do.
