Hidden Shortcuts to Make Level Design Easier

It can take a very long time to complete just one room in Unity not to mention a lot of Assets.

This scene alone has almost 300 different assets in it.

It's not a very big scene either. Thats why it's so important to make sure you have a few tricks up your sleeve to make sure you can drastically cut down on not only the time it takes but also the money spent on Assets used.

Over time through practice, you will become faster at constructing a beautiful scene. Nothing can ever really replace practice, skill, and creativity.

However, having a good understanding of how to put things together can kick you in gear with being creative.

Let's look at this wall. Some might think this wall is an Asset in itself but it's not. This wall along with most of the construction of my scene are a string of smaller Assets. It's really interesting what you can create by stringing together smaller Assets into something larger.

What I like about doing it that way too is that drum roll… 👏👏

You can turn whatever you’ve created into a prefab and reuse it as much as you like. This saves so much on time and having to buy assets. Also, if you don't like the asset exactly how it is; that is ok because it's not the most difficult thing to make minor 3d model changes to assets.

What’s nice about prefabs too is that you can make edits to them which you can have apply to all of the assets you have used, or you can unpack the prefab and edit just the one. Its overall extremely nice to create in this way because of how creative you can ultimately be.

A few other things that are a must to know are a few hotkeys-

If you hold down ctrl while you rotate or move assets; it will move them in a constant increment which is really useful.

My ultimate favorite tool to use is the vertex snap! How annoying can it be when you place assets next to each other only to discover after putting in some lighting you can see there are seams or cracks within your wall prefab 👎🙃!

By using the vertex snap you can snap assets together by the vertex which makes sure those assets are packed against each other and tight. It's extremely useful and I hope you start to use it to see for yourself.

The way you do it is by holding down the v-key. When you hold down the v-key you will see the vertices in the object you can selected. You click on it and drag it to the Vertice of another object, and it will snap them together. It might seem a little difficult at first to snap where you want but once again practice will remedy that quickly.

Another little hint to keep things running smooth is through the Hierarchy.

When you have a ton of game objects it can be cumbersome in the Hierarchy window of Unity. It's really important you create empty game objects to act as place holder parents to whatever group the objects might belong to.

It's good to first split them via static and dynamic first. You can break it down as much as you want afterwards, but what's beautiful about it is when you hit the arrow next to the left of the parent object; all of the game objects will then get hidden.