Hey, I've been trying to figure out how to go about level design for my game for a little while now.

I've read some articles about level design and watched some videos, but it feels like everyone is just talking about open world or some kind of FPS game. My game is played on a single screen with no camera scrolling and with combat that allows you to fire bullets in a straight line. How would I design a level for that? I feel like I'm stuck, or does level design even matter in games like this? Do I just create random levels and playtest them to see what works? Any tips or links to some good articles would be appreciated.

Heres a picture for reference of the game

pongu said:
Do I just create random levels and playtest them to see what works?

Yes, i would say.

You can do things like:
Adding power ups, but getting them requires to take a risk of being shoot easily.
Adding water, which slows players down, making them an easy target. Maybe they can't shoot til they get out.
Adding teleporters to make player trajectories less predictive.
(i guess you already have ideas 1 and 3 in some way)

Iirc, the Jump'n'Bump game did some of those things.
I really liked this game. People made custom levels for it, and i've made one too.
You could make it easy to mod, to enable such option.

Visuals look great.
But i would make the dark grey platforms brighter as they are hard to see.