Level Design Showcase

Before Closure presented a unique "level design" challenge: how can we create a sense of progression in one bedroom when the player cannot move?

With limited resources, we worked within two constraints:

• The entire game takes place in the same bedroom;

• The player interacts with a box of items through a first-person camera that can rotate but stays fixed.

Although audio drives the experience, I wanted the environment to support the narrative arc. During pre-production, I partnered with our art lead, Xindi Zhang, on three approaches:

1. Lighting Progression

We designed the story to begin with packing in midnight and end with moving out in the early morning. 

• The lighting changes reflect the journey from sweet memories through bitterness to acceptance and closure.

• It also gradually reveals more details of the room. 

2. Changes in Visual Style

At the climax, when the protagonist is overwhelmed by memories, we shift to a point-cloud visual style to reveal the bedroom’s past as the couple’s shared home.

3. Audio and Focus Progression

• Audio: The room tone builds from near silence in Act 1 to a subtle fluorescent hum in Act 2, then blends with an urban soundscape coming through the window by the ending.

• Depth of field: The background gradually comes into focus, revealing more of the room as the story progresses.

Click to learn more about the project.

I took this interior level from concept through whiteboxing, set dressing, collision editing, and gameplay implementation.

The primary goal is to create a sense of curiousity as the player explores the character's old home in a wheelchair.

• What worked: The Father's Workshop caught many playtesters’ attention early in their exploration and gave them something to look forward to.

• What didn't go well: Players repeatedly crossed the living room without new narrative beats, interactions, or changes to keep those return visits interesting.

• Click to learn more about the project.

• Configured gameplay props and level bounds for two new zones in Windtrace, a "prop hunt" hide-and-seek event, using miHoYo's proprietary level editor.

• Balanced enemy compositions, wave sequencing, and encounter pacing for a tower-defense event released in Version 2.6.

• Designed, prototyped, and iterated on a procedural level-generation system with 8 different types of level modules, delivering clear specs and whitebox levels to the environment art team.

• Configured encounters within each level module.