Exploring Levels!

Aubrey Rugroden

Aubrey here!

Games are all about exploring new spaces. Where are you? What are you doing here? What is this space? In a good story, the setting — where something takes place — can be a character in and of itself.

As game devs, we also do our own kind of exploring! I’m a level designer, and part of my job is to explore new methodologies for creating the settings in Pigeon Sim. What do we want from our levels? Where is this place? What can we do here? I ask questions like these every day, and I use “greyboxes” (the initial “sketch” of a 3D level) to answer some of these questions.

Here are some shots of what I’ve been exploring:

This city, and much of its surrounding landscape, is all just a bunch of grey boxes (get why we call it “greyboxing” now?), but as a level designer it allows me to rapidly put my ideas to paper (or in this case, to screen) and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

We hope to use concepts like this to create a nice blend of handmade and procedurally generated levels.

Do you like what you see? You may find a finished version of this city, or others like it, in your time in the world of Pigeon Simulator! I can’t wait for you guys to explore with us!