Personal · Level Design Practice · Last updated 2026

LD PROTOTYPE

Level design explorations on existing games and original prototypes: building inside the tools other games already ship with, rather than starting from a blank engine.

Portal 2

A custom map built in Portal 2's level editor: Lovely Cube.

The map runs on one constraint. The player keeps and uses the same Weighted Companion Cube from the first room to the last, and never gets a second one. Each zone is built around moving that cube, not around solving a puzzle and leaving it behind.

The same act comes back three times. In the intro the player incinerates a cube that means nothing to them. Late in the map they have to give up a second one to save their own. The exit only opens once they destroy the one they carried the whole way.

Opening: the exit in plain sight, and a line of cubes going into the water

The first thing the map shows is the exit, visible and out of reach. To the right, behind the mesh, companion cubes travel down a production line and drop into the water one after the other. The player is told where they are going, and what this place does with cubes, before touching anything.

Portal 2 · Lovely Cube · the level exit behind a red laser field, and a production line of companion cubes dropping into the water

// First room · the exit is shown, the cube line falls into the water

Then the map has the player do it themselves. The intro closes on a forced incineration, the Portal 1 scene played straight, on a cube they have no reason to care about yet.

// Intro · the first cube the player is made to destroy

The floor turns out to be a trap: turrets close in, and the only way out is to throw yourself down a garbage chute. At the bottom, in the trash, there is one cube. That one is the key out.

Four mechanics around one cube

The cube is the constant. Everything else is there to move it, block it, or make it reachable.

Weighted Storage Cube Receptacle

The goal of most zones: the socket the cube has to reach. It is visible from the moment the player walks in, so the question is never where the cube goes, only how it gets there.

Pedestal Button

Rotates a wall panel to a set angle. It is the one thing the player can change about the geometry of a room, and every zone reuses it differently.

Excursion Funnel

Carries the cube where the player cannot carry it, and pulls the puzzle off the floor into the vertical space of the chamber.

Thermal Discouragement Beam

Arms and disarms parts of a zone. The player bends its angle with portals rather than moving the emitter.

// Excursion funnel · the cube travels through a portal

// The cube lands in the next zone

One of the last puzzles: a cube for a cube

To get their own cube through, the player has to sacrifice another one. At that point it reads as a price paid for the puzzle. It is really the map saying what it is going to ask for next.

Portal 2 · Lovely Cube · one companion cube held behind a grille, the player's cube on its platform across the chamber

// Two cubes in the room, one of them leaves it

Ending: you only get out by giving it up

The exit stays shut while the player still has the cube. After a full map spent keeping one object alive, the last move is the one the intro already made them do on a stranger.

BattleBlock Theater

Under construction

CS:GO

Under construction