Before you put your hand on the engine of choice and design your level, or even think in the level itself, it is good to have a beat chart prepared. In this way you can have a big picture of the result of the level design iteration.
The most common way of doing that is by using the most important tool for game designers: spreadsheets.
Prepare a sheet with the following information
- Level: the number of the level in the sequence
- Skill Atom: what should the Player learn/practice/improve in this level?
- Minutes: how much time should the level last from start to finish in a perfect scenario?
- Difficulty: what is the fail rate percentage of this level for an average player?
- Skills: Core, Secondary, Obstacles and so on. Color those cells to represent the presence of old and new skill atoms in the level
- Author: Who is in charge of designing this level?
- Comments: after each iteration the other level designers can leave comments here