LEAP Into New Worlds
Designing a vertical journey that makes players feel like they're racing toward the sky.
Genre
3D Platformer, Obstacle Course
Development
Jan - Feb 2026
About the Project
LEAP is a professional Roblox project where I worked as Lead Level Designer on a futuristic obstacle course focused on continuous vertical progression. Rather than building a large world to explore, the goal was to create the feeling of climbing through a much larger city - one jump, one platform, and one landmark at a time.
My Role
I was the sole Level Designer on the project, owning the level from early blockout through playtesting to final polish. Alongside level design, I contributed to set dressing throughout — adding environmental clutter, billboards, and flying cars to help sell the sense of a living, futuristic city.
How do you make a player feel like they're climbing toward the stars, without just building a wall to climb?
Create a Sense of Ascension
Make the player feel like they're constantly rising — closer to the top of the world with every section — without relying on a literal, straight climb upward.
Build a Living City
Reinforce the feeling of a real, futuristic environment through set dressing, so the climb feels like it's happening inside a place, not just a course.
Key Decisions
Rethinking Where the Hub Lives
Early on, the project had two separate spaces: a hub the player looked out from, and a separate city where the actual obby took place. In a discussion with the Principal Designer, I proposed placing the hub directly inside the obby city instead — cutting down on production work, and letting players in the hub watch others tackling the course in real time below them. I didn't design the hub itself, but repositioning it inside the world became one of the project's more effective decisions for very little extra cost.
Turning One Platform Into a Hundred
Fading platforms are a familiar mechanic, but having one large slab disappear under the player's feet felt flat for a game built around climbing a futuristic city. I wanted the effect itself to feel like it belonged in that world, not just a generic floor vanishing.
I experimented with breaking a single fading platform down into smaller pieces instead. The change immediately felt more at home in a neon, tech-heavy setting — closer to a surface destabilizing piece by piece than a floor simply disappearing. Getting there took more than just the idea, though: I spent time tuning the fade timing and stagger between pieces until the effect read as intentional and futuristic rather than glitchy or chaotic.
Challenges
The project ran on a tight four-week timeline with a small team — myself as the only Level Designer, alongside a Lead Artist, Artist, Principal Designer, Sound Designer, one programmer, and a Director. Every design decision had to work within that scope, which meant prioritizing the ideas that would have the biggest impact on the feeling of ascension rather than chasing every idea I had for the level.
Looking Back
LEAP Into New Worlds fundamentally came down to designing for a moment, not a marathon: this was a short, focused experience built for people to play once, at a live event, rather than a game meant to hold players for hours. The experience reached 740.5K visits.
I'm not fully happy with how the ending plays out, and it's the one part of the level I'd revisit if I built this again. With more time and a bit more engineering support, there were a few sections I know could have been pushed further — but a four-week conference deadline doesn't leave room for everything. What mattered most here wasn't chasing a high player rating on Roblox; it was delivering an experience that worked in the moment it was built for. By that measure — the client's event went well, and the game did exactly what it needed to do.
