Over the years, I’ve worked across various genres and platforms – from cozy exploration spaces to high-intensity combat arenas – and I’ve developed a personal framework that helps me get started on any new level. I call it the SCOTT Method. Yes, it's named after me. At least it’s easy to remember.

Level design shapes a player's journey through a space, balancing mechanics, pacing, and narrative in a way that feels intentional and reactive. It sits at the messy intersection of art, design, storytelling, and systems thinking. That’s why I created SCOTT: to bring some structure to an inherently chaotic and creative process.

It’s not a rigid checklist or a one-size-fits-all solution, but it helps me ask the right questions early on, stay focused on the player experience, and make better design decisions with the time and resources available. I’ve found it especially useful when jumping between vastly different types of projects, which is something I get to do a lot of at Magnopus (one of the perks of working across such varied experiences).

Let me walk you through what SCOTT stands for and how it’s shaped some of my recent work.

S – Start somewhere

The blank page is always intimidating. It’s tempting to jump into the editor and start throwing geometry around, especially when you’ve only got a Jira ticket and a deadline. But I’ve learned it’s better to pause and zoom out.

Before I touch the editor, I try to answer a few key questions:

What’s the goal of this level?
What’s the player doing here?
What is the player meant to experience or feel?
Who’s playing this, and on what platform?

By stopping and taking a second to answer the key questions, it gets you thinking early about potential communication with other departments and gets your creative wheels turning. During some R&D, I decided to apply the SCOTT Method to a custom project in the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). Before I even started, I answered the above questions to define the project, which I named ‘AA Gun’:

What’s the goal of this level?
The player’s goal is to break through enemy defenses and destroy a nearby Anti-Air Gun, which serves as the final objective. It's a key tactical target in the mission, and completing this objective marks the end of the level.
What’s the player doing here?
The player is navigating through a series of combat encounters, facing multiple enemy types with different tactics. They’ll need to stay mobile, use cover wisely, and choose the right weapons to survive and progress.
What’s the player meant to experience or feel?
The level empowers the player to feel heroic through skill-based progression. The player should feel challenged but capable, under pressure, yet able to overcome it through smart choices. The goal is to create a sense of excitement and achievement as the player pushes through tough encounters to progress.
Who’s playing this, and on what platform?
This is a solo experience designed for players of a third-person shooter using Fortnite's mechanics and style, likely on PC or console.

C – Clarify your intent

Once I’ve got a basic understanding of what the level needs to accomplish, I distill that into a single, clear statement. This becomes my North Star. If I can’t explain the level in one or two sentences, I’m probably not ready to build it yet.

For AA Gun, it was:
The player must break through enemy defences to destroy a nearby Anti-Air Gun, a critical target. The player will be challenged in multiple encounters with defenders who use different tactics against the player. The player should feel vulnerable going head-on and under pressure from enemies, but can overcome this using clever movement, appropriate cover, and smart weapon choices.

These statements help align every decision I make – whether it’s layout, pacing, art direction, or interactions – with the level’s core purpose.

O – Oh god! Hasn’t someone already done this?

Every designer pulls from references, and there’s no shame in that. What matters is understanding why something resonates. I always try to gather a wide range of inspiration – games, movies, real-world locations – and break them down into useful components.

Relevant references can include:

Anything with a similar narrative context, art style or environment type.
Anything with a similar style of gameplay.
Anything that evokes an emotion you are trying to replicate in your level design.
Anything that has something cool happen in it that you’d like to include in your design!

For AA Gun, I took cues from:

The gritty, industrial tone of Gears of War
The pressure-cooker pacing of Modern Warfare
The simple but engaging gameplay of Halo.

I also keep a mental list of what not to do. Knowing what to avoid is just as useful as knowing what to chase.

T – Try it

At some point, you’ve got to stop planning and just build. Rapid prototyping is essential. I get basic geometry in the engine as quickly as possible so I can walk the space and feel it.

With AA Gun, I learned to prototype combat sequences first – using placeholder enemies and cover objects to dial in pacing and difficulty – before fleshing out the environment around them. I separated the combat into three very different arenas.

The first needed strategic thinking, with a special enemy type, and lots of cover to provide choice.
The second was a maze of shipping containers, containing powerful close-range enemies, little player control over their path, and high tension.
The final section was a sniping encounter, where the player is under pressure from multiple enemies, but can still overpower them.

These were all inspired by various sources, but it was through building, testing, changing, and ultimately shaping them together within the level that they truly became my own.

Trying things early, failing fast, and iterating often is the only way to uncover what actually works.

T – Team up

Finally, level design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The sooner I bring others into the process, the better the result.

Whether it’s grabbing a gameplay engineer to sanity-check an idea, asking another designer to run through a blockout, or watching someone playtest without giving them any context, it always surfaces blind spots I missed.

At Magnopus, I’m lucky to work with a collaborative team that values early feedback. That kind of openness is essential, especially when building ambitious projects on tight timelines.

There were four key bits of feedback from my prototypes:

The player attacks and pushes through enemy positions, and gets to destroy the Anti-Air Gun, which meets the project objective.
The player is challenged across multiple encounters, but not to the desired extent. Enemies don’t feel threatening.
The player is only under minor pressure if not using cover or skilful movement during encounters.
There are a few different weapons in the level, but not really enough to make the player think about their choices. Adding a bit more variety would help make weapon selection feel smarter and more rewarding.

Why it stuck

The SCOTT Method isn’t some revolutionary technique, it’s a simple framework that helps me keep my head straight during the early, often messy stages of level design. It encourages clarity, experimentation, and collaboration, which are all vital no matter what you’re building.

So if you’re ever staring at a blank editor window, unsure where to begin, maybe give SCOTT a try… start somewhere.

The SCOTT Method: A Level Design Framework in Action