Working on the new Mines world | how to design themed worlds for an indie platformer

I've been working on the new Mines world for my game The Shadow Runner. The background and tilesets are placeholder sprites, but these new obstacles are really making this industrial cave come to life!

Here's my philosophy for designing worlds for my indie game:

There are three themed worlds in The Shadow Runner, the Powerplant, the Mines, and the Factory worlds. These worlds are themed around a specific location that fits the industrial aesthetic of TSR. When I designed the Powerplant world, which is in the TSR demo, I looked at pictures of actual powerplants and tried to capture what I felt when I saw photos of empty, sun-lit rooms with the occasional machine, which can be seen in this screenshot:

The Mines, despite also being open, has more of a claustrophobic feel,  with its difficult to navigate terrain, and the Factory will have a similar feel with its dense machinery. The Mines' open, yet claustrophobic feel can be seen in these screenshots:

This idea of capturing the feeling in the theme also extends to the difficulty. The Powerplant is the easiest of the themed worlds, followed by the Mines, and finally the Factory, the world that will contain the hardest levels in this already difficult platformer. The open feel of the Powerplant, the cluttered feeling of the Mines, and the dense machinery of the Factory, are placed in this order to match the difficulty curve of the game.

Of course, conveying the worlds theme to the player is more than the broad feel of the world. What's important is that the player feels the worlds theme in the moment-to-moment gameplay of the world. The Mines are difficult, but it's the way the difficulty is conveyed in the levels through the enemies, obstacles, and environment, that really sells the world's feel to the player. Examples of the obstacles and environmental hazards the player faces are:

• moving platforms
• spikes
• lasers
• sticky surfaces

To compare, examples of obstacles the player faces in the Powerplant are:

• shock turrets
• electric gates
• large teslas

The three worlds will have unique obstacles based on their theme, the Powerplant focuses on electricity based weapons, the Mines focuses on environmental hazards and passive threats, and the Factory, while I haven't yet designed it, will focus on high-tech security systems.

Anyway, that's what I have to say about designing themed worlds/levels for a platformer game. I'll probably make another post about level design in relation to gameplay and designing satisfying levels for a speedrun platformer.