Week 7 — Oct 6 — Ex 5: Space & Pace

Exercise: Ex 5 — Space & Pace. A short level with a locked gate, a key, and a checkpoint — the first exercise that's really about level design rather than a single mechanic.

Feeds: directly into the Level Map milestone next week (Wk 8). This is the paired exercise-then-milestone pattern from the syllabus: today's small graded scene is deliberately the rehearsal for next week's real level.

Lecture topics, expanded

Tilemap and Rule Tiles. Painting a level as data instead of placing individual sprites — a Rule Tile automatically picks the correct edge/corner sprite based on its neighbors, so a student can block out a level in minutes and iterate on layout without redoing tile art. Worth demoing live: repaint a wall, watch the corners fix themselves.

Modular prefab kits for level blockout. A small kit of prefabs (platform segment, wall segment, gate, hazard) snapped to a grid beats hand-placed one-off geometry — changes to one prefab propagate everywhere it's used, and the level reads as a coherent kit rather than a pile of custom pieces. This is also where TriggerZone starts pulling double duty as both the gate's key-detector and the checkpoint's activation volume.

Checkpoint placement and pacing. Where a checkpoint goes is a pacing decision, not a technical one: too frequent and failure has no weight, too sparse and a single mistake erases minutes of progress. Teach students to place checkpoints at the end of a hard section, not the start of the next one — the difference determines whether retrying a section feels fair.

Connecting it to the milestone

Ex 5's gate-key-checkpoint scene is the smallest possible version of what the Level Map milestone asks for at full scale: a level map plus a walkable blockout of it. Students who treat this exercise as throwaway will be starting the milestone from zero next week; students who treat it as a first draft of their actual level can carry the Tilemap/prefab work forward almost unchanged. Worth saying explicitly in lecture, since the syllabus doesn't state the dependency in those terms.