Unit 7 — Level Building & Ladders
The editor becomes a paint tool and the game becomes a place. Tilemaps, colliders, sorting layers, and the design theory — flow, pacing, difficulty curves, signposting — that makes a big cave buildable and fair.
Lessons
| ID | Title | What you build / learn |
|---|---|---|
| 7.1 | Tilemaps: The Level Editor | grid, palette, paint — drawing instead of placing |
| 7.2 | Tile Collision, Layers & Sorting | composite colliders and the two meanings of layer |
| 7.3 | Ladders I: The Climbing State | trigger zones, gravity 0, a third movement mode |
| 7.4 | Ladders II: Mounts, Tops & Polish | the top-of-ladder problem and the mount prompt |
| 7.5 | Design a Big Cave: Flow & Difficulty | beat charts, sightlines, death audits — zero code |
| 7.6 | Level Studio I | paper to playable: the whole cave walkable |
| 7.7 | Level Studio II + Cross-Playtest | polish two beats deeply, measure the rest |
Concepts this unit owns
Level design as data-driven storytelling: flow, pacing, and signposting are claims about the player's attention. The beat-granular playtest table here becomes Unit 9's dataset. CED: CRD-1 (design before code), DAT-2 (collecting playtest data), IOC-1 (designing for humans).