Efficient Level Creation and Management

I am developing a 3D Brick Breaker game with 100 levels and want to find the fastest way to create and manage these levels. Specifically, The levels contain obstacles and collectible elements for the player, with no additional game logic or unique mechanics per scene.

Does Unity provide any built-in features to streamline level creation,or do I need to manual just move the obstacle with the transform component and do I need to create a new scene for each level manually? Are there better methods for efficiently managing multiple levels in this scenario?

There’s not a single easy answer to this because it depends on how you implement the design. For instance, you may be using game objects to place each brick, or you may be using the Tilemap.

In any case, as with any “many levels” game, you should not make a wholly contained scene for every level but strive towards only editing the data that’s different for each level in a scene. While the data that is constant like the UI, camera, input components and so forth should reside in a single “GameScene” from which you additively load “LevelScene123” into it (and later unload). That makes swapping content much faster.

For a simple game like this it would also work to edit everything in a single scene, and have a root object “Levels” which contains a child object for each level. Then it’s all just a matter of setting the child index representing the current level to active while setting the previously active level to inactive.

This works for a simple game mostly because bloating the scene with the game objects for 100 levels is unlikely to cause memory or load time issues, in fact it will cause switching levels to be insanely fast and editing will be a breeze. Some editor scripting can help you switch levels more quickly in the editor, or even copy or create a level object to make the next.

For a brick game, assuming that most levels have more bricks than empty space, it would likely speed up the editing process to create “full” levels so that you only need to select and delete brick game objects to design the level rather than place and position new ones to an empty level.

1 Like

You can create a scene with just the bat, ball and the surrounding walls then create more scenes with just the bricks and then load/merge the brick scenes additively. Or you could make an in-game level editor so then you can just spawn bricks with a simple click of the mouse button.

Personally I’d probably generate the levels procedurally and have thousands of levels. I find it’s more interesting to create games this way as it can get boring having to keep playing/testing the same static levels.

1 Like

Thank you for your response!

This is my first game, so I’m just looking for guidance. What I’ve decided to do is avoid creating a new scene for every level. Instead, I’ll create prefabs for each level that contain the pre-arranged obstacles. During gameplay, I’ll load the appropriate prefab dynamically.

As for the rest of the game’s state—such as the ObstacleManager, EffectManager, paddle, UI elements, and background environment—I plan to keep them persistent using DontDestroyOnLoad.

Does this approach make sense, or would you suggest a different method?

I’d also like suggestions for arranging obstacles. Using only the Transform component to position them feels a bit tedious and complex. Is there a tool in Unity that can help me create levels more quickly and efficiently?