hey all, after years of waiting I'm finally getting myself into game development! I'm a programmer by trade so that parts been easy,  and everything else I've been picking up with not too much difficulty. 

However,  I'm not super sure where to start or what the process looks like for building levels. Rn I'm trying to sort of think about my game world and its history and build off of that, sketching out a rough draft of the levels as it comes to me (it's  2d game so much easier to do lol).  And while that's fun,  idk if that's the best way to be doing it and i don't want to get too invested in it only to realize it doesn't translate very well. 

So, tl;dr! Do you all have any level design tips/tricks/tutorials you'd like to share? I'd also love to hear anyones general process!

Very excited to be joining this community,  hopefully my post wasn't too long winded lol.

My 1st tip is to trial n error in placing platforms, walls, traps etc. The first attempt is to fit level size, platforms wall etc to fit character's movement. If it's too cramped, make some distance, if it's too empty, add some platforms and walls in between.

My second tip is to know your character's limit. You must know how high he/she can jump vertically, how far he/she can jump horizontally, or dash if he/she could perform dash, just to name a few. Knowing this will give good base on level design, and it's essential for designing metroidvanias.

That first tip might be repeated again for other reasons such as balancing, difficulty control etc.

There are some general principles for designing good and intuitive levels for any kind of game (like push pull, adding landmarks, using Gestalt principles), but these are very generic by nature.

Mostly, I design my levels around the game mechanics. For every level I have a vision, a certain idea or interaction that I want to explore. For instance: there are enemies that chase the player as long as they can see the player. Then I create a (stealth) level where the player has to lure the enemies to different corners of the level in order to escape unseen. That's just one simple example - if your game mechanics and interactions are interesting enough, you can come up with dozens of such ideas. I start on paper drawing a general structure (for instance: the enemies start in these corners, and the obstacles are distributed like this, so this is the general path that the player should traverse...).

Then I create a greybox, for playtesting. For this it's important to be aware of all the details in your mechanics. For instance: in a platformer, the player can jump at most X tiles, and your enemies can only walk through corridors that are at least Y tiles high, etc.

Then it's time to playtest and tweak, to make the level "flow" (for instance: not bumping into walls or ceilings while jumping, and making sure escaping enemies is just difficult/easy enough). When that's done, it's time to decorate it, with the final art.

For my little "arcade" games, this workflow works well...