Try to do the same for your levels: If your environments are imported in other games, they should not be as equally rewarding to experience than in their original game.

If your level seems really classic, well, you fucked up. No harm done, but my advice at this point would be to delete completely the faulty level, erase its dullness from existence and start again, from scratch.

USE REFERENCES FOR YOUR FUTURE LEVEL

The most obvious references when designing a level are the visual ones. Find architectural drawings or photos who capture well what you want to implement in your environment.

If you have some references & concept art used in your art direction, be sure to include them. Your artist(s) will be happy to see their work was not only used to be put on the studio walls to look cool.

A reference for a level I’m working on(Photo by Asia Chmielewska)

Here’s an easy trick that often pays off when I’m looking for references: If you find an image that you want to use as a reference, try to find the author of the picture. The artist’s style, eye, whatever you want to call it, will not be in the one picture you randomly found on Pinterest. Use it to your advantage.

This is what I did with the photo above, and looked at other photos from Asia Chmielewska (check her out if you like architectural/urban photos she makes awesome photos).

The main problem I had when making a paper level design (I’ll talk about it in literally one paragraph), is that slopes are cool, but they need to lead somewhere.

So I found other references I can use to create what’s at the summit of the slope, and it will probably be super coherent because it was in the same photo collection. Neat.

DESIGNING ON PAPER

Once you have all this preparation part down, you can start actually designing the level… on paper.

It’s way faster to iterate on paper than recreate your level digitally.

— My point here is that you should find a //way// allowing you to design your level quickly, so you can iterate swiftly and easily change layouts, details etc. Most people would use paper, but if you prefer using Photoshop, Paint or woodworking, go for what is best for you.