Chapter 4: Creating your first layout

Creating your layout on paper first is a very important step of knowing how your level will look like before creating any of it. When you start with building your level right away and having no layout prepared whatsoever will make it really difficult to keep a clear head of what you want in your level and how you will accomplish this. When you have a layout prepared you know the general idea behind your own level.

So now that we have looked at other games and what are important factors for your level it is time to draw it out. Since we answered a lot of questions about our level in the very first chapter we have a general idea of how it's going to look like. Now it is also time to start taking a look at some photos or screenshots and make a collage of them. So knowing I want to create a level for a stealth game where you infiltrate a camp, I looked for those kind of screenshots.




These images were from camps in AC, Skyrim, Shadow of Mordor and Far cry. All of these games have an element of stealth in their game and are playing around with their environment. Making it great examples for my level. Now aside from screenshots from games we also need to take a look at environments in the real world to get an even better understanding.



With these images in my mind I started to draw my layout keeping in mind the important factors of my map. Which are that it is in a canyon environment, meaning lots of high rocky walls. It has to have grass around the map for the player to hide in. And it is a roman army camp which means a lot of small tents and a couple of bigger ones for the generals.

I created this layout on paper first and then I made it a bit clearer in illustrator. You can draw your layout in Photoshop, illustrator or any other software you want to use right away. I just prefer to draw it on paper first.

Now do keep in mind that your eventual level may look completely different from your drawn layout after you playtested the game and made iterations which is completely fine!

In the next chapter I will start building this level in Unity by using Probuilder which is an amazing free tool to help create your layouts really fast and easy. There are a lot of Probuilder tutorials out there so be sure to check them out before starting with Probuilder.

*Check out this tutorial made by Brackeys on Probuilder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtzIXCKr8Wo