Chapter 5: Building your layout in an engine

Note: This chapter is not going to tell you how to build a level using Probuilder. There are a lot of Probuilder tutorials on YouTube from which I also learned. These tutorials will be better at explaining how everything works than I would. This chapter is going to show my progress when building a level in Unity.

Now comes the part that I find the most fun. And that is creating your blockout. With the use of Probuilder we can make a rather simple blockout by just using simple geometry. And with the Standard assets available from Unity we can already walk through our level.

As you can see from this screenshot it is really basic. I build some walls, two plateaus and a river. The river comes from the standard assets package. Now that we have the basic shape of the environment I am going to block of some places with colliders so that the player can't get out of the map. Because I went for a canyon environment I will be making some sort of rocks to block them off.

It may not look that great. However, it does its job of keeping the player in the area he needs to stay in. You don't want to play test your level and have people getting out of the map and doing weird things. We would like to keep them in the map so that we could actually test what we want to test and that way get the information we need to improve our level.

Now let's build the camp to make the level feel more alive.

Using Probuilder I made a couple of different tents and a guard tower to place around the map. Creating different kind of assets also helps in making the level already feel alive even with just basic shapes like this.

Now we have the base for our camp. It is time to add the mechanics for our game that are important, which is grass. We want our players to hide in grass from the soldiers. This is important for our play test later on. Players need to get through the camp by making use of the grass around the camp. That is the best way for them to sneak around without getting caught. So we will be placing grass among other things to finish the very first blockout.

This is the result of the very first iteration. I made it around nighttime and placed torches around the map to give the player a sense of staying hidden in the dark. I made sure the grass was clear from the rest of the environment by giving it a simple green material.

Our next chapter will be about playtesting your level. Your level is never perfect from the start and always will need playtesting. It is important to prepare yourself for these tests and know beforehand what information you need out of the play test to improve your level. We will be going over these things in the next and last chapter!