Monsters are great right. I mean, I love a good monster as much as the next guy but even the most terrifying monster can’t match the subtle dread of a hallway drawn slightly too long, or a room that feels just *off*. Over and over again in this blog, I come back to the question, âwhy do certain game spaces unsettle us before a single scare is triggered?â But, under the guise of âhorror game level designâ, so far, I have offered little in the way of practical advice on designing such spaces. So, in this blog Iâm going to try and put that right a little by looking at the concept of technical drawing and how designers can âdrawâ that dread (literally) before building it.
I think you know me by now and. if not, why not? I am a horror game level design academic who is fascinated by how space manipulates fear and, perhaps more importantly, how we can engineer spaces to generate fear in our players. However, I donât spend as much time as you might think âin engineâ. Sure, I use Unreal and, increasingly, Godot to realise my ideas, but I’ve come to believe that technical drawing can be used as more than a simple planning toolâit’s the first act of psychological design.
The Architecture of Dread
Probably. my favourite place to be these days is at my drawing table. Plan views and section drawings, once the domain of architects, can now be mobilized as tools of psychological warfare. Research in spatial psychology suggests our brains are highly sensitive to environmental cues that violate our expectations (Appleton, 1975; Bachelard, 1964). When I am at my drawing table incorporating asymmetry, verticality, or dead-end loops into my drawn layouts, I am doing more than killing time sketching out ideas that guide my level design, I am actively crafting fear at the foundational level. As Totten (2014) notes, sketching modular maps enables early pacing and tension control, and all this before a digital asset ever enters the scene.
Time flies at my drawing table, a space where I can implement architectural conventions like plan and section views along with watercolours and freehand sketching to plan for moments of disorientation and unease. For instance, I may spend hours trying to figure out how a seemingly normal layout could be an impossible geometry (e.g., two corridors intersecting without any logical spatial connection) and create a deeply unsettling experience for the player. In this way, the design process becomes about more than simply guiding movement, and more about creating spatial anxieties and cognitive friction within the player.
Stress, Catharsis, and the Geometry of Unease
We (or should that be I) speak a lot about the âpsychologyâ of horror games in this blog. but the spatial design of horror levels can trigger more than psychological responses⌠It has the power to trigger the body. Tight corners, intentionally obscured sightlines, and vertical drops elevate physiological stress responses, resulting in increased heart rate, shallow breathing, and anticipatory tension (McAndrew, 2020). By considering how we can orchestrate these things through the use of sectional drawings, we can plan these effects intentionally, embedding âvulnerability zonesâ like exposed balconies or basements that exploit subconscious fears.
Studies show that spatial constraints contribute to the fear experience even before any audio or enemy has been introduced. For example, players may feel trapped or disempowered in long, narrow spaces. Vertical design elements (stairs, pits, or attics) can generate fear of the unknown and unseen and evoke primal anxieties around falling or surveillance. Used properly, technical drawing offers the designer the opportunity to premeditate such effects using simple diagrams, tracing the emotional contour of each space.
The Uncanny Blueprint: Why We Draw What Shouldnât Be
Why do we return over and over again to horror games? For me. it is because horror dares us to reflect on our inner irrationalities. Drawing impossible geometries, approaching these things as a âdesignâ problem, sketching out corridors that loop unnaturally or rooms too large for their surroundings, echoes Freudâs theory of the uncanny (1919) and Reyesâ analysis of horror architecture (2024). Such designs arenât mistakes; theyâre signals. When something about a layout doesnât add up, the player may not consciously notice, but their subconscious and their body will. This is the dark magic you are aiming to achieve as a horror horror game level designer.
I genuinely believe that creating such anomalies deliberately requires a drawing-first mindset. Through iterations of floorplans and sectional diagrams we can experiment with paradoxical or contradictory spatial logic. Unlike jump scares, these spatial tricks have a power to generate fear that lingers, something we owe to players who dare to tread inside our imaginations.
Conclusion: The Pen as Ritual Knife
I can almost hear the groans of disapproval from those who think starting with pencil and paper for horror game level design is just too boring. To those people. I would suggest that technical drawing isnât just another boring sterile design step to be endured, itâs an invocation. Whether drafting a dead-end corridor or mapping the descent into an abyssal basement, as a horror designer, sketching the geometry of fear is building rituals of space, floor by floor, before sound or code is ever touched. The scariest games aren’t just well programmed, they’re well planned. And that planning begins with pencil, paper, and a subtle understanding of how space haunts us.
References:
Appleton, J. (1975). The Experience of Landscape. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Bachelard, G. (1964). The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Freud, S. (1919). The Uncanny. London: Hogarth Press.
McAndrew, F. T. (2020). The psychology, geography, and architecture of horror: How places creep us out. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 4(1), 5â22.
Totten, C. W. (2014). An Architectural Approach to Level Design. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.