I’m looking to rework some of my level design approaches. Currently, my levels are fairly large, but are made up of multiple independent parts that are accessed linearly. For example:
Each of the big rooms is 100% independent of the other rooms, with double-sealed hallways connecting them. There are a few downsides to this approach, but the biggest is that if I decide to change/remove/add something, it might mean moving everything else. That’s pretty annoying.
I’m looking at making my level construction more modular. I’m specifically not looking to load sections dynamically at runtime, as I don’t think it’s really necessary, so I’m fine with all of these sections existing at once. I just want to make it easier to make the pieces more independent. I was thinking that each room could be its own scene, since it’s truly independent from the every other room. I started mocking this up, adding subscenes to a main parent scene, but I found that this isn’t really how things work.
Every time I leave the “parent” scene, the subscenes are removed from it. I don’t see a way to compose a scene of multiple subscenes. I’d like to be able to move the subscenes around to line them up. But I can’t get the parent scene to remember its children.
Is this even a viable approach to level construction? I’d also considered making each room a prefab, but I kind of dread how clumsy it will be to edit the prefabs this way, having to pop into and out of prefab mode every time I want to delete something from a scene.
So, you build large scene from subscenes like this? What approach do you use to organizing the subscenes?