12 Level Design Tips to Optimize Your Indie Game You Should Know

In this game dev tutorial, learn 12 essential level design tips to improve your level building skills while learning how to create immersive game levels and worlds. These tips will help you improve your game dev level building skills, as well as game design and level design for your next indie game.
We cover a range of level building techniques using popular game development tools such as Occlusion Culling, Modular Assets, and game performance optimizations in the Unity game engine, as well as creating your own game assets in Blender.
These tips are a foundation for improving level design and world building, and can be applied to all game engines (not just the Unity game engine), including Unreal Engine 5, Godot 4, or even your own custom game engine. By following these tips, you'll be able to improve your game's levels and create immersive game worlds through level design and game performance optimization techniques.
So whether you're looking to create better levels or improve your overall game design skills, this tutorial is packed with valuable tips to help you achieve your game dev level design goals and create immersive game worlds that your players will love.
Remember to share your game development related level building or world building tips in the comments below!
💻 Links
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🎬 Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
00:45 - Blocking
01:37 - Modular Assets
03:49 - Prefabs
05:00 - Modelling Assets
06:18 - UVs UVs UVs
07:17 - Seamless Textures
08:38 - Optimisation
14:55 - the most important part
Stay Safe & Thanks for watching! ~(˘▾˘~)
#gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #leveldesign #gamedev #gamedevtutorial #leveldesigntips #indiegamedevelopment #gamedesign #levelbuilding #unity #unity3d #gameoptimization #unrealengine #indiegame #indiedev

[@nitricswight]

Another big tip i would give to save time on texturing is shaders! You can do a surprising amount with just a few shader nodes. It's what I use most often myself, because you can then easily alter and animate your textures.

[@DarkDax]

Great tip, there are quite a few indie games that use shaders exclusively for their textures. You can get some brilliant results using them! Thanks for sharing!

[@gravity_mxk5663]

Biggest game changer for me personally was buying and reading through real time rendering fourth edition.

[@Skrubscribble]

despite not knowing any game development, I'm just gonna sit here and watch entire 17 mins of video and commeting so you can reach into algorithm.

[@DarkDax]

You dropped this 👑

[@RobLang]

Really cool roundup! My top tip for world building is make entities aware of their distance from the camera and then ensure your despawn anything too far away.

[@DarkDax]

Good tip thanks Rob! Hope development on Clomper is going well!

[@jacques-dev]

Hello there Rob! Glad to see you here :)

[@RobLang]

@@DarkDax it is, thanks! Doing menus right now. 👍

[@RobLang]

@@jacques-dev great to see you too! 👋

[@ScoutOW2]

I'm finding your videos very well put together, funny, entertaining, and something I will keep close to my heart for years to come! You got yourself another bell!

[@KakaCarrotCakeVideos]

It is easier to make simple elements look good or realistic compared to complex one, this is why Mirrors Edge looks so good, there is barely any vegetation and one of the few naturalistic elements are humans and some effects like fire. When texture try to be more than they actually are, they end up not looking realistic, but a mere representation of what they are trying to be, which can be jarring to look at unless it is trying to be a painting or a display.

[@PeterDanielBerg]

another banger video dax. big mood at the end. i was working on a 3d voxel game project where i wanted jumping _and_ a fixed iso camera angle _and_ no subpixel misalignments, so the player would need 3d shadows to distinguish depth from altitude. so i set all sprites to 1ppu with the asset importer, wrote another script that scales a cube primitive and adjusts its UVs based on the dimensions of the fold-up texture applied to it, and an editor script that rounded the currently selected object's coordinates to the nearest integer when it was being moved. works great for rectilinear levels. unfortunately my current project is low poly and set entirely outdoors! and so far i haven't found a good guide on best practices for outdoor env design that doesn't use the default terrain tools. even using a shader to make the horizon curve away is a headache.

[@DarkDax]

Thanks mate! Genuinely sounds like some Doctor Strange stuff, very impressed you managed to find a way around it! Yeah there's a lot of environment design resources out there that are more directed things like guiding players through the level rather than the differences between interior and exterior design. Hope you find what you're looking for soon!

[@PeterDanielBerg]

​@@DarkDax custom editor tools save so much time it's crazy. mine basically amounted to texture origami but once it was written i felt like i had forged a sword. i encourage everyone to make them. for now i guess i can start by downloading resource packs for desert islands and seeing how _they_ do it. like is it okay to make the whole island one mesh? how should it be subdivided? do i hide the edge between the beach and the forest underneath shrubs? that's the kind of thing i'm talking about. the boundary break episodes on animal crossing were great for seeing world curvature in action, but man i hope shesez does an episode on the witness.

[@DarkDax]

@@PeterDanielBerg I was literally about to bring up the Animal Crossing episode from Boundary Break! Great insight into how the industry and massive studios handle these sorts of situations. It's also interesting seeing how much time and effort devs give to such minor issues that we'd otherwise fret over for hours.

[@makra42069]

Thanks for these tips!!

[@DarkDax]

No problem mate! Thanks for watching!

[@MetaPikachu]

Good stuff, I am very close to making levels for my game and this is a good starting point for optimizing what I already have in store. First things first tho I have to find out a way to render more than 2 enemies in sight at more than 30 FPS.. 3k verts on a an enemy model thats supposed to be complex shouldn't be this resource heavy Unity! Please let me have fun!!

[@DarkDax]

Glad I could help! It's also a reminder for future me when I'm wondering why my game's performance sucks haha. Game Engines can never let you have fun without first having a moment to complain!

[@geolbaker]

Best map making tip that I know of is to ask chat gpt to do it all for you

[@DarkDax]

It's only logical

[@Sulleone]

Here I am watching Unity tutorial while making a game on Godot. Perfection P.s. Okay, making is a strong word but I am learning how to!

[@DarkDax]

It’s all the same mate! Take it one step further, you’re crafting experiences! Hope your project is going well!

[@IPlayKindred]

great video

[@DarkDax]

Thanks mate!

[@Mafa0001]

Talks about LODs: Meanwhile UE devs: *laughs in nanite*

[@DarkDax]

Literally hahaha

[@cakestealer5983]

Wouldn’t it be funny if I just didn’t use Tiled and did EVERYTHING in Aseprite

[@sno7599]

not enough ppl are talking bout this in a fun way

[@westingtyler2]

i love everything except how he says "eligible " like illegible", like you can't read it, not like it qualifies for something. "static batching allows all illegible meshes (meshes you can't read because they are written poorly) to be combined into the same buffer."

[@DarkDax]

Damn didn't think I'd be called out by a Bulborb today lol

[@westingtyler2]

ha true. but seriously I'm loving the vids. keep up the awesome work. @@DarkDax

[@westingtyler2]

ana haha yeah the avatar looks like a bulborb, totally unintiontional, a character from my game i'm developing. now I guess i gotta go delete all my 3d models haha