Level Design Combat Encounter Design
Unannounced Souls-like Round8 Studio (Neowiz) · UE5 · Details under NDA
Level Design Combat Encounter Design
Unannounced Souls-like Round8 Studio (Neowiz) · UE5 · Details under NDA
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Unannounced Souls-like Round8 Studio (Neowiz) · UE5 · Details under NDA
Working on an unannounced open-world Souls-like title at Round8 Studio as Senior World Designer, owning world layout, field content design, and combat encounter placement across a large-scale explorable environment.
Project details are under NDA — what follows is an overview of my design process and methodology on this title.
Field Content & POI Design
Field Content & POI Design
Structured and visualized field content density — accounting for estimated playtime, interaction complexity, and player traversal speed on foot and mounted — to define encounter pacing, reward distribution, and player progression rhythms across the open world. Content "beat" was classified into four tiers (Micro, Small, Medium, Large), ranging from 30-second ambient interactions to hour-long legacy dungeon sequences anchoring the map.
Layered World Design
Layered World Design
Worked across environment, narrative, and gameplay layers to identify LD-applicable POIs from world-building assets — translating environmental storytelling elements into spatial design opportunities such as patrol routes, ambush setups, and exploration hooks. Maintained a living content map tracking POI placement, zone activation sequences, and field distribution to ensure the world reads as intentional rather than arbitrary.
Player Flow & Spatial Readability
Player Flow & Spatial Readability
Designed first-view compositions for key areas to establish landmarks and orient players. Mapped traversal routes and narrative sequences across the field, tuning content distribution to maintain consistent pacing — balancing moments of tension, discovery, and rest as players move through the world.
A personal level design exercise — a vertical exploration dungeon designed for a Souls-like context, built and documented in Unreal Engine 5.
The document covers zone structure, spatial rhythm, player branching routes, and design philosophy. Monster placement and some encounter details are omitted — partly due to NDA constraints around project-specific design language, and partly by intent, as the focus was on spatial logic, player agency, and branching structure rather than full encounter specification.
A few design notes not captured in the document:
Dungeon placement intent: Designed for the early-to-mid game — when players are fluent with core systems but ready to be challenged on spatial observation and interpretation. The Mining Tunnels are also imagined as an expandable underground network that could connect to future dungeons.
Cliff entrance as vertical landmark: The bridges visible from the entrance are the actual traversal nodes of B1–B2–B3. Players who reach each bridge re-encounter the same view from a new angle — reinforcing spatial understanding and a cumulative sense of descent.
Cathedral 2F as release valve: Deliberately combat-light. After the tension of the tunnels, this space is designed to give the player room to breathe, look back down at where they came from, and discover the shortcut — a pacing counterpoint before the final encounter.
Retry friction as intentional design: The 1-minute walk from bonfire to boss room is a deliberate choice — minimal enough to not frustrate, long enough to prompt reflection and reset focus before the next attempt.
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