The puzzles have to fit the world as best as possible, at least the way we do it," said Miller. "Jonathan Blow loves to feature the puzzles, so his levels, the puzzles that are there just in some ways can be arbitrary, because the thing is the puzzle. But I think what we've done and what we've gotten to in our little niche, what we do, we're trying to balance all three of the legs that I think are interactive: the environment, the puzzles, or whatever the friction is, and the story."
He added later that it’s “a pain in the ass.”
“We have people who are in charge of those aspects. So the art guy may come up with a visually stunning looking piece of equipment, but the story guy goes, ‘That doesn’t make sense, that couldn’t be in this world,’ and we have to figure that out.” The same goes in any direction—puzzles that don’t fit the story, story that doesn’t fit the art. It must be cohesive.
For West, a level design could start as a sketch on a soggy bar napkin (he actually once approved a bar napkin scrawl as an initial design) or an MS Paint drawing, but from there he believes collaboration with artists is vital so that they “don’t get handed this dodecahedron that’s done in this gray flat texture and get told to turn it into a carousel.” He wants to see plausible spaces, and he makes a point of saying that it’s a team effort, that “the best level designers are the ones who work well with their artists.”