7.6 — Level Studio I

The contract for today:

• Every beat on your sketch exists as painted tiles, from the entrance to your goal, with no gaps in the floor.
• Every beat is passable. You do not need it to be fun yet — you need it to be reachable.
• Every ladder is two objects: the painted strip, and the trigger zone you placed over it. Neither one alone is a ladder.
• Every spike, coin, enemy and turret is placed by hand, exactly where the sketch says. None of them are in this scene until you put them there.
• The goal works. Whatever you chose in 7.5 — a lever door, a collectible, or an exit — it must actually function before you leave today.

Build order — and it matters:

1. Tile Palette window → Collision → grey-box the floor of the whole cave first. One long walk from the entrance to the goal, flat, using plain rock tiles. Game view → press Play and run it. The walk is the spine of the level; everything else hangs off it. Do not decorate, do not place a single hazard.
2. Tile Palette window → Scene view → add the vertical structure, beat by beat: ledges, walls, drops and ladders. After each beat, Game view and walk the entire cave from the entrance. The full-length walk is your build ritual — it is the only test that catches the problems you create three beats behind where you are working.
3. Project window → Scene view → Inspector → place the threats last. Spikes, enemies, turrets — in that order if your sketch allows, because a spike is a tile's worth of work and a turret is a wired-up object you have to finish by hand. Each one is the trap above, made real. Threats are the most expensive thing to move, so they go in when the geometry has stopped changing.
4. Scene view → Inspector → build the goal, and prove it works. Place the lever, the coins or the exit where your sketch says, then wire the lever's event in the Inspector — with the wiring decisions from the In the Code half below already settled. Then walk the whole cave one final time and finish the level the way a player would.

Two files are doing the work behind your goal, and neither one is a file you write today: Lever.cs on the lever, and whatever answers its event on the door. Decide these before you wire anything, because the wiring is what makes them true.

Every trade has a build order, and every trade has learned it the expensive way. Read each of these for what it does in isolation, then work out which line of your own studio brief it is arguing with.

Example 1 — A road crew's paving order:

// Base course, then kerbs, then the surface. Pave the surface
// first and every later machine digs up your work.

Example 2 — A theatre's fit-up schedule:

// The set is flown in before the lights are focused.
// Focus the lights onto nothing and you focus them twice.

Example 3 — An aircraft assembly station:

// The wing is joined before the systems are routed through it.
// Nothing heavy goes in after the wiring.

Example 4 — A formwork carpenter, stripping a mould (comment only):

// The form is scaffolding. It is removed once the pour has set,
// and the face is finished last.

Example 5 — A restaurant kitchen's prep list (comment only):

// Mise en place: everything cut and placed before the pan is hot.
// The pan waits. The prep never does.

• Example 1 says the surface goes on last because later machines would destroy it. Which objects in your cave are "later machines" that destroy an earlier layer of work?
• Example 2 says focusing lights onto a missing set means focusing twice. Which of your beats would you have to re-polish if you moved its geometry afterwards?
• Example 3 says nothing heavy goes in after the wiring. Your lever's UnityEvent is the wiring — should you wire it before or after the door's collider exists? Defend the order.

End-of-studio checks. Every one of them answers to the walk ritual, not to your opinion.