Level design 101 – planning

Now, just because we are going to be diving straight into Unity, I feel it's important to talk a little more about how level design is done in the game industry. While you may think a level designer will just jump into the editor and start playing, the truth is you would normally need to do a ton of planning ahead of time before you even open up your tool.

Generally, a level begins with an idea. This can come from anything; maybe you saw a really cool building or a photo on the Internet gave you a certain feeling; maybe you want to teach the player a new mechanic. Turning this idea into a level is what a level designer does. Taking all of these ideas, the level designer will create a level design document, which will outline exactly what you're trying to achieve with the entire level from start to end.

In this article by John Doran, author of Building FPS Games with Unity, a level design document will describe everything inside the level; listing all of the possible encounters, puzzles, so on and so forth, which the player will need to complete as well as any side quests that the player will be able to achieve. To prepare for this, you should include as many references as you can with maps, images, and movies similar to what you're trying to achieve. If you're working with a team, making this document available on a website or wiki will be a great asset so that you know exactly what is being done in the level, what the team can use in their levels, and how difficult their encounters can be. Generally, you'll also want a top-down layout of your level done either on a computer or with a graph paper, with a line showing a player's general route for the level with the encounters and missions planned out.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Of course, you don't want to be too tied down to your design document. It will change as you playtest and work on the level, but the documentation process will help solidify your ideas and give you a firm basis to work from.

For those of you interested in seeing some level design documents, feel free to check out Adam Reynolds' Level Designer on Homefront and Call of Duty: World at War at http://wiki.modsrepository.com/index.php?title=Level_Design:_Level_Design_Document_Example.

If you want to learn more about level design, I'm a big fan of Beginning Game Level Design by John Feil (previously, my teacher) and Marc Scattergood, Cengage Learning PTR. For more of an introduction to all of game design from scratch, check out Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers and Wiley and The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schel.

For some online resources, Scott has a neat GDC talk called Everything I Learned About Level Design I Learned from Disneyland, which can be found at http://mrbossdesign.blogspot.com/2009/03/everything-i-learned-about-game-design.html, and World of Level Design (http://worldofleveldesign.com/) is a good source to learn about level design, though it does not talk about Unity specifically.

In addition to a level design document, you can also create a game design document (GDD) that goes beyond the scope of just the level and includes story, characters, objectives, dialogue, concept art, level layouts, and notes about the game's content. However, it is something to do on your own.

Creating architecture overview

As a level designer, one of the most time-consuming parts of your job will be creating environments. There are many different ways out there to create levels. By default, Unity gives us some default meshes such as a Box, Sphere, and Cylinder. While it's technically possible to build a level in this way, it could get really tedious very quickly. Next, I'm going to quickly go through the most popular options to build levels for the games made in Unity before we jump into building a level of our own.

3D modelling software

A lot of times, opening up a 3D modeling software package and building an architecture that way is what professional game studios will often do. This gives you maximum freedom to create your environment and allows you to do exactly what it is you'd like to do; but it requires you to be proficient in that tool, be it Maya, 3ds Max, Blender (which can be downloaded for free at blender.org), or some other tool. Then, you just need to export your models and import them into Unity.

Unity supports a lot of different formats for 3D models (most commonly used are .obj and .fbx), but there are a lot of issues to consider. For some best practices when it comes to creating art assets, please visit http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/02/art-assets-best-practice-guide/.

Constructing geometry with brushes

Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG), commonly referred to as brushes, is a tool artists/designers use to quickly block out pieces of a level from scratch. Using brushes inside the in-game level editor has been a common approach for artists/designers to create levels. Unreal Engine 4, Hammer, Radiant, and other professional game engines make use of this building structure, making it quite easy for people to create and iterate through levels quickly through a process called white-boxing, as it's very easy to make changes to the simple shapes. However; just like learning a modeling software tool, there can be a higher barrier for entry in creating complex geometry using a 3D application, but using CSG brushes will provide a quick solution to create shapes with ease.

Unity does not support building things like this by default, but there are several tools in the Unity Asset Store, which allow you to do something like this. For example, sixbyseven studio has an extension called ProBuilder that can add this functionality to Unity, making it very easy to build out levels. The only possible downside is the fact that it does cost money, though it is worth every penny. However, sixbyseven has kindly released a free version of their tools called Prototype, which we installed earlier. It contains everything we will need for this chapter, but it does not allow us to add custom textures and some of the more advanced tools. We will be using ProBuilder later on in the book to polish the entire product. You can find out more information about ProBuilder at http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/probuilder/.

Modular tilesets

Another way to generate architecture is through the use of "tiles" that are created by an artist. Similar to using Lego pieces, we can use these tiles to snap together walls and other objects to create a building. With creative uses of the tiles, you can create a large amount of content with just a minimal amount of assets. This is probably the easiest way to create a level at the expense of not being able to create unique looking buildings, since you only have a few pieces to work with. Titles such as Skyrim use this to a great extent to create their large world environments.

Mix and match

Of course, it's also possible to use a mixture of the preceding tools in order to use the advantages of certain ways of doing things. For example, you could use brushes to block out an area and then use a group of tiles called a tileset to replace the boxes with the highly detailed models, which is what a lot of AAA studios do. In addition, we could initially place brushes to test our gameplay and then add in props to break up the repetitiveness of the levels, which is what we are going to be doing.

Creating geometry

The first thing we are going to do is to learn how we can create geometry as described in the following steps:

From the top menu, go to File | New Scene. This will give us a fresh start to build our project.
Next, because we already have Prototype installed, let's create a cube by hitting Ctrl + K.
Right now, our Cube (with a name of pb-Cube-1562 or something similar) is placed on a Position of 2, -7, -2. However, for simplicity's sake, I'm going to place it in the middle of the world. We can do this by typing in 0,0,0 by left-clicking in the X position field, typing 0, and then pressing Tab. Notice the cursor is now automatically at the Y part. Type in 0, press Tab again, and then, from the Z slot, press 0 again.

Alternatively you can right-click on the Transform component and select Reset Position.
Next, we have to center the camera back onto our Cube object. We can do this by going over to the Hierarchy tab and double-clicking on the Cube object (or selecting it and then pressing F).
Now, to actually modify this cube, we are going to open up Prototype. We can do this by first selecting our Cube object, going to the Pb_Object component, and then clicking on the green Open Prototype button.

Alternatively, you can also go to Tools | Prototype | Prototype Window.

This is going to bring up a window much like the one I have displayed here. This new Prototype tab can be detached from the main Unity window or, if you drag from the tab over into Unity, it can be "hooked" into place elsewhere, like the following screenshot shows by my dragging and dropping it to the right of the Hierarchy tab.
Next, select the Scene tab in the middle of the screen and press the G key to toggle us into the Object/Geometry mode. Alternatively, you can also click on the Element button in the Scene tab. Unlike the default Object/Top level mode, this will allow us to modify the cube directly to build upon it.

For more information on the different modes, check out the Modes & Elements section from http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/docs/probuilder/#buildingAndEditingGeometry.

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You'll notice the top of the Prototype tab has three buttons. These stand for what selection type you are currently wanting to use. The default is Vertex or the Point mode, which will allow us to select individual parts to modify. The next is Edge and the last is Face. Face is a good standard to use at this stage, because we only want to extend things out.
Select the Face mode by either clicking on the button or pressing the H key twice until it says Editing Faces on the screen. Afterwards, select the box's right side.

For a list of keyword shortcuts included with Prototype/ProBuilder, check out http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/docs/probuilder/#keyboardShortcuts.
Now, pull on the red handle to extend our brush outward.

Easy enough. Note that, by default, while pulling things out, it is being done in 1 increment. This is nice when we are polishing our levels and trying to make things exactly where we want them, but right now, we are just prototyping. So, getting it out as quickly as possible is paramount to test if it's enjoyable. To help with this, we can use a feature of Unity called Unit Snapping.
Undo the previous change we made by pressing Ctrl+Z. Then, move the camera over to the other side and select our longer face. Drag it 9 units out by holding down the Control key (Command on Mac).

ProCore3D also has another tool out called ProGrids, which has some advanced unit snapping functionality, but we are not going to be using it. For more information on it, check out http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/progrids/

If you'd like to change the distance traveled while using unit snapping, set it using the Edit | Snap Settings… menu.
Next, drag both the sides out until they are 9 x 9 wide. To make things easier to see, select the Directional Light object in our scene via the Hierarchy tab and reduce the Light component's Intensity to . 5.

So, at this point, we have a nice looking floor. However, to create our room, we are first going to need to create our ceiling.
Select the floor we have created and press Ctrl + D to duplicate the brush. Once completed, change back into the Object/Top Level editing mode and move the brush so that its Position is at 0, 4, 0.
Alternatively, you can click on the duplicated object and, from the Inspector tab, change the Position's Y value to 4.
Go back into the sub-selection mode by hitting H to go back to the Faces mode. Then, hold down Ctrl and select all of the edges of our floor. Click on the Extrude button from the Prototype panel.

This creates a new part on each of the four edges, which is by default .5 wide (change by clicking on the + button on the edge). This adds additional edges and/or faces to our object.
Next, we are going to extrude again; but, rather than doing it from the menu, let's do it manually by selecting the tops of our newly created edges and holding down the Shift button and dragging it up along the Y (green) axis. We then hold down Ctrl after starting the extrusion to have it snap appropriately to fit around our ceiling.

Note that the box may not look like this as soon as you let go, as Prototype needs time to compute lighting and materials, which it will mention from the bottom right part of Unity.
Next, select Main Camera in the Hierarchy, hit W to switch to the Translate mode, and F to center the selection. Then, move our camera into the room.
You'll notice it's completely dark due to the ceiling, but we can add light to the world to fix that!
Let's add a point light by going to GameObject | Light | Point Light and position it in the center of the room towards the ceiling (In my case, it was at 4.5, 2.5. 3.5). Then, up the Range to 25 so that it hits the entire room.
Finally, add a player to see how he interacts. First, delete the Main Camera object from Hierarchy, as we won't need it. Then, go into the Project tab and open up the AssetsUFPSBaseContentPrefabsPlayers folder. Drag and drop the AdvancedPlayer prefab, moving it so that it doesn't collide with the walls, floors, or ceiling, a little higher than the ground as shown in the following screenshot:
Next, save our level (Chapter 3_1_CreatingGeometry) and hit the Play button.

It may be a good idea for you to save your levels in such a way that you are able to go back and see what was covered in each section for each chapter, thus making things easier to find in the future.

Again, remember that we can pull a weapon out by pressing the 1-5 keys.

With this, we now have a simple room that we can interact with!

Summary

In this article, we take on the role of a level designer, who has been asked to create a level prototype to prove that our gameplay is solid. We will use the free Prototype tool to help in this endeavor. In addition, we will also learn some beginning level designs.