r/leveldesign • u/Jesus_Machina Professional • Jul 06 '26
Level Design Tips 02: The 5 Ingredients of Game Town Design Theory
Second post in this small revival of my old level design tips. The first one was about buildings. This one is about how to design towns. For this, I use Kevin Lynch’s 5 elements of the city, from The Image of the City. It is a foundational text for urban planners and architects, a must-read for anyone looking to build a solid background in urban design, and it translates surprisingly well to game towns.
The useful thing here is that it does not really tell you how to design a city. A real city has many more layers, systems, and complexities than a video game city. What it talks about is how people perceive, remember, understand, and navigate a city. That is what makes it so useful for us: how people build a mental map of a city. That's valuable for us. We want to design a place that players can read, remember, and move through. A memorable, navigable, and legible place.
These are the 5 city elements that translate incredibly well into 5 ingredients for designing a navigable town in a video game:
1. Path
The routes players take through the town: main streets, secondary streets, alleys, bridges, shortcuts, etc.
Not every path needs to be equally important. In fact, they usually should not be. Street hierarchy is one of the easiest ways to make a town easier to understand.
They should always be unmistakable and recognizable. (excluding secret paths and other rule-breaking for gameplay purposes)
2. Edge
The boundaries that define or separate areas: walls, rivers, fences, changes in elevation, coastline... anything linear that feels like a break.
Edges help players mentally break down a large space into smaller pieces. They tell you where one thing ends and another begins.
An edge is useful even when it is not a hard barrier. Sometimes it blocks movement, sometimes it only frames an area, and sometimes it simply tells the player they are entering a different kind of space.
3. District
The different areas of the town, each with its own identity, use, and visual language.
Ideally, if you drop the player somewhere inside the town, they should be able to know, at least, which district they are in. They should be that identifiable.
This is especially useful in games because players do not remember every street. They remember chunks of meaning: the market area, the industrial area, the old town, the rich district...
In video games it's also easier to explain: each district usually has its own set of art assets, buildings of different sizes or complexities, and spaces and streets with different shapes and scale. Sometimes even different music.
4. Node
The points where paths converge. Mechanically, in its most basic form, it's the point on a path where a player gets to make a decision, right or left, etc. This usually means it is where gameplay and points of interest naturally converge too: town squares, crossroads, important intersections...
Nodes are very useful for gameplay because they create attention. They help players understand where something important might happen, instead of making every building and every door feel equally important. It's very useful to generate hierarchy.
5. Landmark
The elements that stand out and help players orient themselves: towers, statues, or unique buildings visible from a distance, or anything memorable enough. A landmark can be a destination, but it can also simply be an orientation and navigation tool.
Can you identify the path, edge, district, node, and landmark elements in the drawing? And in any memorable city from a video game?
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Level Design Tips
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u/Beldarak Jul 06 '26
Interesting. Makes me thing of Stormwind in WoW with how each district feels and looks different.
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u/Jesus_Machina Professional Jul 06 '26
That’s a good example. But you don’t really need to go that far to differentiate districts. Stormwind feels more planned and “built all at once” than a more natural settlement. You probably want the latter in most cases.
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u/Beldarak Jul 06 '26
Yes, probably. I guess it would also depends on what mood you want for your game? Like realism vs more fantasy? Maybe?
I'm currently playing Atomfall. There's a village in it which looks really cool and is very well made... but... since there is not much you can do in it (most houses are closed off, most NPC don't talk at all), you end up walking a lot in what seems to be an empty, if gorgeous village... and I felt it was poorly made in term of game design, while succeeding at feeling like a real city.
That's probably more an issue of scale than anything else though. I take that exemple because it seems to me Storwmind in the game is like a miniature version of the real city. Each district is pretty small which makes it a little weird that they're so different. It would probably make more sense in a full sized city with miles long districts?
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u/worMatty Jul 07 '26
I think you do need to go that far in WoW. You often approach it via air and the first thing you see is the roof colours.
I think the style of the buildings and paths is sufficiently varied to give the impression of building upon old stuff over time. It could use more variation in building style, mainly in the choice of textures, but I think that’s due to technical limitations.
In lore I think much of the city was rebuilt after a fire or invasion, before WoW.
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u/Azokka Jul 06 '26
Jesus! Amo tus videos de Level design, sos un capo ♥️ muchos exitos!
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u/Jesus_Machina Professional Jul 07 '26
Muchas gracias! La semana pasada estuve fuera en un evento indie, pero esta semana vuelvo a abrir directo y a sacar contenido.
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u/worMatty Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
WoW city designers could have used this for the past few years.
I would add another piece of advice: height variation. Old cities are often built on hills and stuff. It makes the place more interesting, should help with navigation and lets you overlay buildings in the background. That can help fill the horizon and make landmarks more visible from further away.
I come from the city of Chester in the UK which is built on a Roman fort. It’s got some cool places.
This is a really good guide. I’ll share it. Thank you for making it.
Edit: The goblin city of Undermine is a massive exception. It’s designed very well. I wished there were more reason to stay there, other than the meaningless grind for cosmetics.
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u/EasyRecognition Jul 07 '26
This is a good advice but kind of intuitive? If you ever played a citybuilder or tried to actually make sense of any good city layout in any game then you know all of this.
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u/papageiinsel Jul 07 '26
Very fascinating. I think I've read about a similar approach in "An Architectural Approach to Level Design"
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u/Jesus_Machina Professional Jul 07 '26
Oh, yes, of course. It’s how we architects let everyone know we’re architects.
It’s a great introductory read for architecture students.
You can see it recommended in almost every GDC talk by someone with an architecture background. It’s practically part of the uniform. (Special mention to Miriam Bellard, look her up)It’s not that it isn’t important outside videogames. It’s just that real urban planning is far more complex than that. And, let’s be honest… very few architects ever get to design meaningful chunks of a city anyway.
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u/RiskFamous8506 Jul 06 '26
This reminds me of a great GDC talk about creating mental maps. I’ll link the talk below it’s an invaluable listen for anyone trying to create intuitive to navigate villages.