Level Design : Sci-fi Lab Room
Observations on efficient practices for level design with Unity3D.
- Use of Prefab and variations in a clean hierarchy
- Installing floor tiles, arches, columns, ceilings and doorways
- Implementing colliders for the scene
- Exporting scene as package
Unity allows to break down prefabs to quickly create asset variations. Having prefabs that are easy to turn into custom floor tiles and walls broadens the amount of level of detail that can be given to specific areas in a room. This gives a very customized environment with an organic architecture; a place where the user may feel the structures belonging to a possible (fictitious) culture. Using prefabs that follow an archeological culture is something that fascinates me about designing game space and navigation. If implemented correctly, going through hallways to the correct location becomes a fun and immersive experience. For this case, I built a Sci-fi Lab Room.
The room consist of floor, walls, columns, ceiling, struts, equipment, and the colliders.
Floor
Let’s start with the floor, as it consist of two parts, the black tiles and the “yellow waves” which are the prefabs that look like domino pieces.
These are the two prefabs created by using 5 assets from filebase.
For such a small room like this, two prefabs were enough to lay the entire path around the room and manually change the order of the 3 dots on the right side of the room, as these tiles ran perfectly as intended on the left path. It has a wave that takes the user through the sides without visually crashing into the columns.
Walls
This east side view of the walls is mirrored on the other lateral side.
The end of the Lab room, which is the north side.
Turning back to the entrance, towards the south view
For the walls area, there are 4 main assets that were easy to customize and add more to fill up the gaps.
Columns and Arch
Columns is a pretty simple area, intuitive to make once the floor and walls have their own character; they just become support of that same pattern
Two prefabs for this section, one for the column and the other for the arch.
Ceilings
I really wanted to take this opportunity to create windows, and I felt that the ceilings had the best space for this. For this lab room with an entrance corridor, I needed two roofs at different heights; it helps broadening the player view when entering from the hall into the main room.
Both ceilings have windows, the main room has a flat-horizontal window, where the entrance room has two small, vent-like windows vertically.
This one turned into prefab, as well as the struts that support the ceiling on top of the columns.
Struts
These give a great sense of depth as well as structural support to make the architecture more realistic and technical.
And once the door was added to the entrance, some support that gives depth and mass is essential to make the doorway more like a space craft room.
Equipment
Finally, the reason why this room exists is to hold in some experimental equipment; I took a different approach from the one at GameDevHQ to match my background more with what these scientists intended for a taller room and a color division.
With my design, I am pushing towards elegance and a little bit of clean geometry. Having a background wall that splits into two black areas, I wanted to give that a purpose, so I had two small test tubes lay on top of a platform on the left side with a couple of terminals, while a huge test tube on the right side, giving sense to the tall room and a little bit of irregularity within all the mirroring already done by the architecture. Here we can even see how the ceiling window lays sunlight on top of the computer terminals, which is great for scientists to take some Vitamin D.
Colliders
Finally, time to make the room’s colliders before adding a player into the scene.
A bunch of box colliders for optimization and simplicity. Pretty neatly installed and works amazingly to navigate the room.
The equipment also got its own box colliders for more realism.
Exporting Scene as a Package
At this point, the scene is great to be taken into any other project. It can serve as a Lobby, as the end of a mission, and many different games can take this scene and use it if I simply export it as a package.
By exporting the scene as a package, Unity takes all the used materials, prefabs and scene, saves it as a unity package that can easily be implemented into other rendering pipelines and easily adjusted for custom lighting and mood setting. This is also best practice to easily recover a built room like this in case something goes astray and avoiding developers to rebuild a whole room like this; even with prefabs at hand, this package feature saves more time.
