Sometimes you end up making code that no one will ever see. Case in point: FLUTTERFLY has a bunch of different levels made up of different colored boxes. Several boxes put together make what I’ve dubbed a ‘Glow Box Set.’
A picture speaks a thousand words so here’s what the glow box sets look like in-game:
And here’s a glimpse at the Unity3D inspector window for everything that goes into one set:
There are a ton of parameters to keep track of: position variables for all the boxes, what type of box each one is, are we raining? Is this the last set in the level? etc. etc.
For a while I was tweaking all this manually. Now you can imagine that for a game with over 100 levels, where each level consists of 6-20 sets, the work becomes unmanageable real quick.
So I took a few days to design an app for my app. I created a new blank scene and set up a tool for level creation.
It seemed like a big pain in the arse at first, but it honestly went quicker than expected. And now that the tool is done, designing levels is a breeze– and even fun!
Here’s a look at my nifty new tool at work:
Much, much better than manually entering Vector3 position values one at a time.
Getting Dirty in Unity3D
So here’s a bonus PRO TIP for you Unity guys/gals out there. So you have your awesome level editor working and you make your tweaks in playmode, hit stop and WAIT! Where’d all my changes go?
As every Unity dev knows, changes made in Editor in playmode are not persistent. It has to do with serialization which is a huge topic unto itself. But I don’t want a seminar in serialization– I have a game to make! To get my level editor working I just needed to know one thing: How do you programmatically change prefab parameter values in Editor during runtime and have them stick around when you hit stop?
Easier than you might at first think. You just have to GET DIRTY.:)
Add a
using UnityEditor;to the top of your class, and then call
EditorUtility.SetDirty(yourObject);to save changes to values you tweak in Editor playmode. With my tool, I call SetDirty when I press the ‘Save’ button (shown above).
Now you can write a ton of values quickly and procedurally at the click of a button (ie– where should all these boxes go? well here’s 100 Vector3’s generated by code). Just be sure to comment the above two lines out before building, because as far as I can tell Unity won’t build if any of your scripts have a UnityEditor ref.
With the tool, now at least I have a fighting chance to finish this thing! Plus it has made level design quite enjoyable– a nice change from the torturous process of manual tweaking.
