My design experience goal for this level was to give the player a sense of searching and investigating and to have the flavor of the real world Winchester Mystery House. To achieve the mechanically, I chose to build the level with key and chest mechanics and to include traversal through walls to subvert traditional traversal in level design and create interesting, puzzle-like spaces that feel as though they continuously unfold. Emotionally, I was going for creepy, but mysterious and intriguing. I achieved this with layout techniques, particularly hidden sections and sightlines.

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My graybox was huge and used highly visible temp art to represent the keys and chests. The rooms were very similar, short and wide, with a lot of samey connections between rooms and halls. I played with several issues like: Is there enough space to make the player put forth an effort to search? What’s the relationship of keys to the critical path? The balance of hiding keys on or off the critical path. In playtesting the graybox players generally found all the keys, but needed several trips around the space to find them.