Worldbuilding
Level Scale Reference
Direct answer
Believable spaces come from a handful of dimensions: a 2.1 m door, a 2.6 m residential ceiling, a 17 cm stair rise, 1.1 m waist-high cover and a 2 m comfortable corridor. Games then widen circulation by roughly a third, because a camera needs more room than a body does.
Human-derived dimensions rescale with this. World objects like vehicles stay put.
How much wider than reality your corridors and doorways are, to give the camera room.
The human figure
| Dimension | Size | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Standing height | 1.8 m | scales |
| Eye height standing | 1.65 m | scales |
| Shoulder width | 0.46 m | scales |
| Crouched height | 0.95 m | scales |
| Prone height | 0.35 m | scales |
| Comfortable reach up | 2.1 m | scales |
| Step-up a player accepts without a jump | 0.4 m | scales |
Architecture
| Dimension | Size | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Door height | 2.1 m | scales + widened |
| Door width, single | 0.9 m | scales + widened |
| Door width, double | 1.8 m | scales + widened |
| Ceiling, residential | 2.6 m | scales + widened |
| Ceiling, office or shop | 3.2 m | scales + widened |
| Ceiling, industrial hall | 8 m | scales + widened |
| Corridor, comfortable | 2 m | scales + widened |
| Corridor, tight and deliberate | 1.2 m | scales + widened |
| Window sill height | 0.9 m | scales |
| Handrail height | 1 m | scales |
| Stair rise per step | 0.175 m | scales |
| Stair run per step | 0.28 m | scales |
| Ladder rung spacing | 0.3 m | scales |
Combat and traversal
| Dimension | Size | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Waist-high cover | 1.1 m | scales |
| Full-height cover | 1.9 m | scales |
| Crouch-only cover | 0.9 m | scales |
| Comfortable jump across | 3 m | scales |
| Comfortable jump up | 1.2 m | scales |
| Safe fall without damage | 3.5 m | scales |
| Mantle-able ledge | 1.5 m | scales |
The world outside
| Dimension | Size | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Car length | 4.5 m | fixed |
| Car width | 1.8 m | fixed |
| Car height | 1.5 m | fixed |
| Road lane width | 3.5 m | fixed |
| Two-lane street with pavements | 12 m | fixed |
| Terraced house frontage | 6 m | fixed |
| Storey height, outside | 3 m | fixed |
| Street lamp height | 8 m | fixed |
| Mature oak height | 20 m | fixed |
| Shipping container, 20 ft | 6.06 m | fixed |
Method & assumptions
How this is worked out
Every dimension marked as human-derived is stored as a ratio to a 1.8 m figure and rescaled when you change the character height. If your protagonist is 2.4 m tall, a door at 2.1 m stops reading as a door, and the table tells you it now wants 2.8 m.
Architectural and circulation figures additionally take the widening percentage. Real corridors are built for bodies; game corridors have to accommodate a camera that sits behind and above the character, plus a combat encounter. Thirty per cent over the real figure is the usual starting point, and it is the single most common reason a faithfully measured building feels cramped in engine.
World objects — vehicles, roads, trees — do not rescale. They are the anchors that tell the player how big everything else is, which only works if they stay the size the player already knows.
Questions
How tall should a door be in a game?
2.1 m matches reality and works for a 1.8 m character, but most games go to 2.2 or 2.4 m so the camera does not clip and the player does not feel they are ducking. Scale it with your character height if that height is not roughly human.
How wide should a corridor be?
Real corridors are 1.2 to 1.5 m. Games want 2 to 2.5 m for a first-person view and 3 m or more for a third-person camera, because the camera sits behind the character and needs somewhere to be. Narrower than 1.2 m reads as deliberately claustrophobic.
Why does my level feel cramped despite correct measurements?
Because correct measurements are for bodies, not cameras. A third-person camera needs roughly a third more room in every direction, and combat needs more again. Building from architectural drawings without that allowance is the most common cause of a level that measures right and plays wrong.