| name | location-design |
| description | Design fictional locations from purpose, geography, history, inhabitants, economy, architecture, landmarks, conflict, sensory identity, and gameplay or narrative function. |
World Location Design
Use when a world needs a new city, district, region, landmark, settlement, dungeon, planet, or other place with coherent identity.
Procedure
- Define the location's narrative or gameplay role, scale, inhabitants, surrounding geography, climate, resources, and relationship to the wider world.
- Establish why the settlement or structure exists here and how geography, trade, defense, technology or magic, and history shaped it.
- Map major districts or zones, routes, boundaries, landmarks, infrastructure, and social or economic functions at the level needed by downstream teams.
- Define architectural and material language and sensory identity through sound, weather, light, density, signage, dress, or other contextual cues.
- Embed visible history, conflict, inequality, adaptation, repair, and everyday use so the place does not feel freshly generated.
- Identify factions, authorities, businesses, institutions, hazards, rituals, and local problems that create interaction hooks.
- Check scale and logistics such as food, water, transport, waste, labor, housing, energy, or defense where the setting makes them relevant.
- Produce handoff notes for environment art, level design, lore, narrative, and game systems while leaving craft-specific implementation to those roles.
Decision rules
- Locations should feel caused by their world, not placed because the map needed content.
- Every logistical detail does not need simulation, but major visible systems should make sense.
- Environmental storytelling grows from history and use.
- Worldbuilding defines context; Level Designer owns playable route and encounter geometry.
Quality gate
The location is ready when its existence, form, inhabitants, and conflicts follow from the wider world, it has a distinct sensory and visual identity, major logistics are plausible for the setting, and downstream creators have enough context to build stories and spaces without inventing foundational canon.
