Hi everyone,
The Tech Content team just published a blog post announcing a new guide for level designers. Introduction to game level design is filled with work and career tips, and instructions on how to use the Unity tools that are most relevant to worldbuilding. It’s written by professional level designers working in the games industry and Unity product experts with backgrounds in game and level design.
If you’ve read the blog post and are here to download the pdf, keep scrolling to find it towards the end of this post.
The blog post provides more details about the book and an excerpt from the section on grey- or white-boxing levels with ProBuilder. A few details we’d like to repeat here is that this e-book was created in collaboration with Stefan Horvath and Christo Nobbs, professional level designers with over a decade of experience in the games industry. They wrote Part I, which details the responsibilities and workflows of a level designer in the preproduction and production stages of game development.
A gym level made with interactable elements of a prototype and obstacles for testing purposes
Part II is written for level designers who have little or no experience with Unity but are interested in learning how to use it. This section covers tools like Unity Visual Scripting, the Physics and Animation systems, and offers an introduction to the Unity Asset Store.
A blocked-out scene with assets labeled with helpful names, such as “P_GenericWall_200x300cm” – the P prefix indicates that it’s a Prefab, followed by what the asset is (a wall), and then its measurements.
Part III takes a deep dive into design tools, like ProBuilder and the Terrain system, that designers can use to create high-quality prototypes of levels to share with colleagues and stakeholders. ProBuilder enables you to design, grey-box, prototype, and playtest levels in Unity without 3D modeling software or professional 3D artists. It provides many tools for creating and manipulating objects, including smoothing, stretching, flipping, mirroring, extruding, dividing, coloring, and texturing objects.
The e-book includes detailed tables listing each tool and how to use it. This excerpt includes the introduction to ProBuilder and a few of these tools.
A tower asset imported from the Unity Asset Store; when you convert it via the ProBuilderize action it can be modified like a ProBuilder mesh
You can download the level design e-book here: Introduction to game level design.pdf (26.2 MB)
More advanced guides for Unity creators
Our level design e-book is the latest addition to Unity’s collection of advanced guides for professional developers, artists, technical artists, and designers. All the e-books are written by Unity experts and free to download. You can find them and many other resources on the Unity best practices hub.
Let us know what you think of this guide!