Outside of my course at Playback Studio I played around with one of the tutorials that Unity has on their Learn platform. I chose to go with the 2D Game Kit as it was a new area for me to explore. In the tutorial, Unity shows you how to create a simple 2D level using the assets they provide. They have a sample scene level to show you what can be achieved and give you inspiration and then ask you to open a new scene and start to build your own.

Having a template to work from really gave me some confidence to work on the things I understood most about Unity such as connecting components, scripts and materials to game objects as well as giving me my first real shot at level design.

The new scene had the character Ellen on a small platform made up of tiles. I learnt about painting with the tileset pallete to create steps and platforms for Ellen to navigate. I placed interactable objects like the moving platform and the shoveable box, placed collectables such as the chest and the key and made the block be able to damage the enemy when it fell on them.

I placed a trigger switch and made it inaccessible to Ellen other than via her gun, having to crouch down and shoot at the same time, and tied this switch to the door which was an interactable object which lowered on trigger of the switch.

The tutorial showed me how to teleport the character by placing prefabbed transition points in the scene. I decided to make this a portal and put a portal door in the same locations as the (invisible during gameplay) transition points. I set these up in a way in which the player can go through one portal but, as indicated by the red door, cannot travel back through it.

At the end of my level I placed an environment prefab as a marker to show the location of a transition point to a new scene/level. I made the destination point the beginning of the sample scene.