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Level Design

Have you ever pulled on a door handle, only when you should have pushed? Level design, like door design, is best when you never even notice it.
Through level design you can make people perform actions subliminally. It may sound obvious, but people won’t do what they can’t do.
As a level designer it’s your job to form your levels in such a way that you get people to do what you want them to without them even realizing it.
For example, don’t want people to congregate around a certain area (like the stairs)? Through design, you can make it far less likely that people will gather there (like by making it smaller and less inviting than the areas around it).
Through design you can greatly influence how players act.

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- design applies to everything we usea, not just video games

One extremely important and often overlooked aspect of VR level design is changes in elevation. When walking around your playspace, the elevation should not constantly change. Even strafing in your playspace but moving up or down an incline in-game can be extremely disorienting.
In VR, changes in elevation should be
  • Expected
  • Deliberate
  • Consistent
  • Short
  • Performed entirely with artificial locomotion (thumbstick or jumping, ideally just one and not both simultaneously for greatest comfort)

VRChat has a layer called Walkthrough; if you set an object to this layer, physics objects will still collide with it but players will pass through. I would recommend setting much of the furniture to this layer.

{If you’re super interested in level design, you can read this 123-page document on the topic by industry experts[docs.google.com].}

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