Hidden Shortcuts to Make Level Design Easier.

Objective: Cover some features of Unity to make level design easier.

There are a few things that Unity has that makes Level Design a little easier. To start off, are some Key binds. Select the move tool, or hit the W key, selected and the object that you are wanting to move selected, you will see the move gizmo. Red arrow is for the X axis, green is for the Y axis, and blue is for the Z axis.

To make quarter movements, you can hold Ctrl and the arrow and the object will move a .25 distance.

You can also use the CTRL to rotate the object in 15 degree turns. The rotating gives a dial looking gizmo and you can see how far you rotated. Select the rotate tool or hit the E key on the keyboard to the the gizmo up.

Now hold Ctrl and grab an axis rotate on.

While on the topic of moving and rotating objects, there is something to pay attention to when moving multiple objects at the same time. The thing to pay attention to is the handle position. It will either be Pivot or Center. You can swap between them but selecting it.

When moving multiple object’s and you want them to rotate together, use Center.

But if you want them to rotate independently, use pivot.

Another very useful key bind that can help shape up a scene is the V key. The V key will help line objects up on the vertexes. This is called Vertex Snap. To do this, while holding V you grab a vertex and align it to another vertex.

Now to make prefabs to help modify assets to get a more beautiful scene. One way to modify an object in Unity is to add more objects to it to create a different looking tile. Below are two Floor panels that are the same but look different.

The one on the left has been modified and the one on the right has not. All that was done to create this was to add another two floor tiles shrink them down to fit and that is it.

After making the two extra tiles a child of the main one, I created a prefab out of it. With it being a prefab, it makes it easier to just drop into the scene and use as a normal floor asset.

This is how I created two different walls. These walls will be used over and over but wont give such a big repetitive feeling.

A final piece of information that makes level design easier is Hierarchy organization. To keep the Hierarchy organized, I created an Empty Game Object and named it static, for all objects that wont be moving in the game. Next was to set a section for the Floors and walls. Every piece that makes up the floor will stay in the Floor empty game object and the same goes for the Walls.

These are some advice that makes level design easier and make quicker for games. Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day!!