Level design process

Paycheck

How I'm building Jungle Zone 1 and the world around it in Unreal Engine 5.

Game overview
LevelJungle Zone 1
Scope1 of 9 zones
My roleWorld & level design
StageBlockout
Featured level

Jungle Zone 1

One connected zone with four landmarks, each with its own missions and flow, linked by walkable paths with no fast travel and reached from two landing zones.

What to look at

  • Each landmark has its own visual identity and its own mission, so players navigate by sight.
  • The cave has two branch points and four route combinations, so repeat runs differ.
  • The Ruins tell a massacre's aftermath through the environment alone, with no dialogue.
Read the full breakdown
Skills

What this level work built

World structureA space station → planet → zone → mission loop built to scale.
Environmental storytellingStory and politics told through layout and props.
Non-linear layoutsBranching, always-connected spaces built for replay.
Colour as navigationA three-colour language that shows who controls each area.
Full breakdownThe design process in detail

The world

One solar system with three planets (Jungle, Snow and Desert), each split into three zones. Players deploy from the Galactic Space Station, land at a deploy point and work through missions on foot. There's no fast travel inside a zone, so the routes between landmarks are designed spaces, not loading gaps. Mission variants (kill conditions, timers, location shifts) and cross-landmark missions reuse the same spaces in new ways.

The Galactic Trade Port

The Galactic Trade Port is a space station run by the Galactic Federation, a neutral body that's corrupt in practice. Factions rent embassy space on it, and whoever funds the Federation most gets the biggest embassy, the best placement and the shortest walk to the landing bay. None of that is explained; it's read from the floor plan. A black-market contact moves between a fixed pool of hidden spawn points on every visit and avoids the embassy zones, so players learn the outpost by searching it.

Colour language

Zone 1 uses three colours so players can read who controls a space before they see an enemy: light blue for cyborg-run areas, light green where the parasites have taken over, and orange for the Nest.

Jungle Zone 1, landmark by landmark

Two landing zones give different first reads of the same space: Alpha on the west side by the docks, Bravo on the southern trail.

  • Small Docks (Reclaim the Cargo): an active cyborg import/export operation on the waterfront. A storage cave beneath it holds the dock commander boss fight.
  • Outpost (Cut the Signal): a multi-level military base around a comms tower, with the command centre on the top floor. Its visual language is control and surveillance.
  • Ruins (Phantom Commander): the remains of a native village. The natives were taken over by parasites and wiped out by cyborgs who mistook them for hostiles; the cyborgs now use it as a research site. Overgrowth and personal effects tell the story.
  • The Cave (Burn the Nest): the zone's parasite hive.

The Cave: Burn the Nest

The cave runs Entrance → Forward Camp → Mine → Egg Chamber → Pre-Hive → The Nest. It's fully open and non-linear, with every area connected at all times, and two branch points create four route combinations. Because the hive always regrows in the lore, Hive Destruction missions can return without breaking the world.

Status

Terrain, docks, outpost buildings and the cave entrance are blocked out in UE5 with Nanite and Lumen. The Forward Camp is in progress, with the Mine next.