Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

It's a very organic process, I would say, between art and design. We work very, very closely together in general. If you look at our larger flagship locations, they tend to start with a concept, so we always know what the deal is, right? If you look at a place like Area 18 compared to Lorville, where Lorville is this dystopian paradise, versus Area 18 being a bit more cyberpunk-y. It's a different approach to how we do the level design as well, because part of level design is to shape the flow and the feeling that the player gets in a location before we have any fancy lights and beautiful textures, right? It's just gray boxes with grids. So depending on the location, the white box will adhere to whatever is required. But we tend to always start from a concept that shows us a snapshot of what that location is supposed to be about, and that gives us a good inkling. And of course then we do a lot of research. With Lorville, we researched brutalism and all these big architectural styles, and it influences what we move forward with quite extensively. But we do work closely with the art departments. We don't usually just go off into a corner as level designers and then emerge two weeks later with the Ten Commandments. That's not what we're doing. We tend to start a little bit by ourselves to do the documentation, and then we merge with an environment artist and start working on the layout and try to adhere to the wishes of both departments, the fun and the beauty.