Lukas Heinen - Undercover

Level Design in Unreal Engine 5 | Solo Project (2025)

The design for a spy

In this project, I wanted to take a deep dive into the design of experiences for a stealth game.
I limited myself to basic stealth game mechanics:

‣ Basic movement (Run/Jump)
‣ Climb ladders
‣ Hide behind obstacles
‣ Duck & sneak
‣ Special ability: Charge the flashlight to kill enemies and activate switches.

Sneak & hide in bushes or obstacles.

Flashlight - charge the flash to activate switches (for example to unlock doors).

Guidance & Spatial communication

Since this was a solo-project, I wanted to focus on specific skills - especially level guidance and spatial communication. Therefore I focussed on these elements:

Conceptualization & Layout

In the next step, I prototyped the mechanics in Unreal Engine and created a 'playground', with all elements included in the game to test and get inspired. After that, I created a lot of concept drawings and scribbles to visualize my ideas.

Then the layout plan of my level was created. That was the last iteration:

Ground floor with the desired player path, enemies, obstacles etc.

Upper floor, drawn on a baking paper to layer it on top of the ground floor.

Greyboxing

Then I implemented the layout into Unreal Engine, and started greyboxing with the UE modelling tool. The focus was on creating intuitive guidance with shapes and basic environment lighting:

Light, Atmosphere & Attractions

After I modelled all basic shapes in the first and second floor, I then added some placeholder assets
to get a better impression of how the environment feels:

Then I changed the environment light and added the night atmosphere. With moonlight, blue light colors,
contrasting warm lamps and fog I created the general static mood of the stealth game:

Night sky with a huge moon.

The main yard of the level.

With some wind, cloth animations, and emissive objects, I added some attraction points to win the players attention:

Fluttering flags, to lead the player's sight in the right direction.

An important entrace which is destroyable, glowing in orange.

Physics objects that fall in the direction of the desired attention.

When the guidance was playing fluently, I continued working on the enemy system and event functionality in blueprints. Since my focus was on level design and not environment art, I did on purpose not implement more assets into the level than necessary.

Final level design

After some optimization and player feedback, I finished my level design and could now pass it on to an
environment artist to together complete the experience!