Tabletop to Hack and Slash: Level Design

Hail, Pathfinders!

Sharpen your blades and ready your spells, the Abomination Vaults await. Built nearly 500 years ago by the sinister Belcorra Haruvex, this sprawling dungeon is filled with traps, monsters, and secrets waiting to be uncovered… and we’re bringing every dark hallway and haunted chamber to life in-game.

In last month’s Tabletop to Hack and Slash entry, we ventured into the Darklands to meet the mysterious Caligni. This time, we’re going straight into the Vaults themselves, revealing how the rooms and encounters from the classic Adventure Path are being transformed into fully realized, playable spaces.

For this feature, we’re focusing on Floor 8, showcased in our Gameplay Trailer earlier this year, to give you an inside look at how our team approaches level design. We sat down with Creative Director Wyatt to discuss how the process works, from early sketches to final encounters.

The Level Design Process

From Page to Playable Map

Before anything else, we wanted to know how a Pathfinder floor goes from words on a page to an environment you can explore and fight through.

“The process begins with immersion: A full and careful read-through of the chapter…”

Q: Can you describe the process of transforming a floor description from the book into a playable game map?

WYATT: The process begins with immersion: A full and careful read-through of the chapter and hours watching online “DM Helper” materials on YouTube. These help the team digest, contextualize, and expand our understanding and imagination of the chapter.

With a strong grasp of the chapter, we then identify the most valuable components. These include essential characters, plotlines, and artifacts and are used to imagine a structured narrative flow.

We also map out a quick proposed 2D layout of the floor to anchor ourselves around the intent, major areas, and overall player flow through the level.

With the flow and sketch in place, our artists begin creating concept art and our level designer builds a graybox of the level. The concept art guides our environment artists in “set dressing” the graybox with 3D art, informs our lighting and VFX, and inspires the level designers to create or support the grand visions of our artists.

Eventually, combat designers add and balance combat encounters. Narrative designers add the quests, dialog, NPCs, clues, the narrative gates that trigger those dialogs, etc.

We continually iterate on the level, playtesting and giving feedback, until we feel each area has an acceptable level of quality. Later in the project, we return to each level with a more complete vision, toolset, narrative and fine tune them, bringing them to completion.

Moving From 2D to 3D

Expanding the Dungeon Into a Full-Fledged Biome

Once the team has a layout, the next challenge is transforming a flat, page-sized map into something immersive and explorable.

“The first step is re-imagining each floor as a much larger biome rather than a house-sized space.” – Wyatt

Q: How do you translate 2D maps into a 3D game space? What challenges or opportunities does it create?

WYATT: According to Paizo, the maps of Abomination Vaults were shaped to fit on a single page of their book. Since our game is action-driven, we need a MUCH bigger space for players to explore and fight in. So, the first step is reimagining each floor as a much larger biome rather than a house-sized space.

Since 3D enables much more visual immersion, we capture that by including verticality into our designs. Whether