Fast way of positioning game objects?

Unity Engine
1

So currently I’m working on my first level, and I really don’t like how hard it’s for me to lay out game elements like platforms and coins evenly.

Basically what I mean, is currently if I want all coins to float a certain Y distance above the platform, I have to calculate the distance between the ground and platform, by taking away the Y of the ground, from the Y of the platform, and I use the number that’s left over, as the distance between the platform and coin. (I find this the best way of doing it right now, as the coin is never too far off the platform, and neither is it too close to it. It also means I have a lot more consistency in everything’s placement.)

So I have to take the Y coordinates of the ground game object, and take it away from the Y coordinates of the platform game object. And what I have left, I add to the coordinates of the platform, and I get the Y coordinates for the coin.

Now as you can most likely imagine, this is close to impossible for me, as I will most likely have over 500 coins throughout the entire game. So doing this for every single coin, with both, waste a huge amount of my time, and most likely take away a good chunk of my sanity.

Another problem I have, is that if I put a moving platform next to a pillar of ground, and to the left of it are some floating platforms, the moving and static platforms aren’t going to be on the same Y coordinates due to many variables in the positioning. And if I change the Y of the static ones, they’re not going to be the same distance away from each other and the ground.

The biggest inspiration for the game I’m making, are Captain Claw, and Rayman Legends. Now, I’m sure that both these games don’t have everything laid out in such a precise and consistent manner, and if someone was to put all the platforms next to each other, there would be a great deal of difference in their heights. But it’s just the way I want my game to be made. I want everything to be in a tile-like system.

The tilemaps that were present in the most recent alpha version, kind of worked. The only problem I had with them, was that they were just that. Tilemaps. And each tile couldn’t be worked on as a separate game object. Therefore I couldn’t make stuff like moving platforms, and blocks that could become pass-through, if something was triggered.

So can anyone tell me, if something exists, that would make the placement and arrangement of 2D sprites very quick and efficient? Assets from the asset store, a C# script, literally anything. There’s just absolutely no way I will force myself to calculate the position of almost every single game object.

Thank you very much for reading, and thank you to anyone who replies.

2

You might be interested in my SpriteTile asset. It’s made to be dynamic, where you can add/delete/rotate/move/etc. tiles at runtime easily, so pass-through blocks aren’t a problem. Moving platforms would be separate game objects, which you could place in the scene manually, or use the GrabSprite function to turn tiles into normal sprites and then use AddComponent on them to add any scripting components necessary. (Also the upcoming version 3 has the ability to directly put prefab links into the tilemap, so prefabs are automatically instantiated where desired.) Just so you’re aware, it comes with a couple of demo character controllers, but generally you’d be expected to program your own to suit your specific game.

–Eric

2 Likes
3

There are many different editors out there, tiled is a good one, i’ve seen eric’s program, not sure what language it’s programmed in, but it looks good, I myself use my own editor, it uses the normal stuff you would expect to see in any editor but also uses a plugin system which should allow a greater range of games you can develop, but go for any editor it’s the best way and it will save one level per scene which is lunacy.