Nightmare Kitchen Lev-log 01
- P Michael Norris
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Last year I joined some ex-Meta colleagues at Byteback Studios to head up level design and help co-create Nightmare Kitchen - an upcoming greasepunk co-op shooter. My focus is rooms, puzzles, and encounters; shaping bespoke layouts and the grammar system that will eventually enable full procedural generation.
The game world blends 90s mall nostalgia with the industrial grit of a kitchen apocalypse, creating a whimsical, grotesque, and chaotic atmosphere. Each dungeon reflects a biome themed around a different food court staple: American, Asian, Mexican, health food, and dessert, all reimagined through a surreal, over-the-top lens.
Defining Rooms with One-Sheets (Intent Phase)
Before touching Unity, Procreate, or Maya, I start by defining the purpose of each room. Every one-sheet is a single-page breakdown of what the room needs to achieve, independent of art, layout, or world theme. This clarifies design intent before any structural decisions are made.
Each one-sheet covers:
Room goal or purpose
Theme for the current world
Design elements and hazards
Player interactions
Player experience or emotional target
With the room’s intent established, selecting the right structural template becomes more straightforward.
Universal Room Templates (Structural Phase)
Once the one-sheet defines the purpose of a room, my next step was choosing how it should be built. Universal Room Templates provide an underlying structural identity for every space before world-specific theming is applied. This creates a consistent foundation and makes scaling toward procedural generation easier.
Templates include:
Vertical: Height-focused layouts, lifts, escalators, jump pads, open combat spaces
Close Quarters: Tight corridors, chokepoints, overhangs (pipes), small combat spaces
Moving Platforms: Conveyors, sliding partitions
Hazard: Smashers, spikes, breakable floors, oil (lava) pools
Challenge: Non-combat rooms built around timing & traversal
A Design Approach Inspired by Classic Mario
My template system is inspired by Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. These games reuse a small set of level archetypes across every world, but each world reinterprets them with its own theme and hazards. The structure stays the same, but the flavor changes.
Overland (Default): Move freely & experiment with core movement abilities
Underground: Constrained movement emphasizing precision, timing, tight spacing
Bottomless: Every jump is a commitment; confident action with no safety net
Swimming: Adapt to altered physics; slower, floaty traversal, requires planning
Ghost House: Subverted expectations; puzzles, misdirection, environmental awareness
Fortresses & Castles: Structured gauntlets to test pattern recognition and learned skills
We want to follow this same approach in Nightmare Kitchen. Instead of reinventing room types for every biome, the core templates remain consistent. Each world will add its own identity through art, hazards, traversal elements, and combat pacing. This will keeps levels scalable and readable while giving each biome a strong personality.
Building the Modular Kit
With the one-sheets drafted, I moved on to creating our modular level kit. My initial kit included the core building blocks needed to assemble rooms on the most basic level. Every piece needed to snap to a 2.5 meter grid. That grid is important not just for blockout, but for the game’s future procedural generation system - each 5 meter chunk will eventually become the cut points the grammar system uses to recombine and generate rooms dynamically.
By building the modular kit early, I ensure that every room shares the same structural language. It keeps layouts consistent, readable, and quick to iterate on, which is essential for a small team. These modules will later be taken to final art, so the early groundwork reduces rework down the line.
As rooms began to take shape and biomes and sub-biomes were defined, I expanded the level design kit to reflect the game’s visual identity. The original ProBuilder grid material served its purpose for determining scale, traversal, and combat, but now that those mechanics were locked in, I replaced the grids with kitchen, castle, and industrial-themed materials.
Up Next...
Next, I'll dig into how the one-sheets and room templates come to life as playable greyboxes in Unity using my level blockout kit
In the meantime, join us on Discord and wishlist Nightmare Kitchen on Steam to stay up to date as development continues!