Week 8 — Oct 13 — Level Map (critique)

Milestone: Level Map (5 pts) is due and critiqued live — a level map plus a walkable blockout of it. No new exercise; the block becomes review.

Fed by: Ex 5 Space & Pace (Wk 7). Students who built that gate/key/checkpoint scene as a first draft of their real level walk in with most of this done; students who treated it as disposable are blocking out from scratch today.

Lecture topics, expanded

Scene management and streaming. Most student games fit in one scene, but multi-room or multi-level projects (Detective Liz's five floors, Zap Attack's four sectors) need SceneManager.LoadScene at minimum, and LoadSceneAsync with additive loading if the level is large enough that a load hitch would be noticeable. This is also the natural place to revisit GameStateManager's scene-reload behavior from Ex 3 — a checkpoint respawn and a full scene reload are different operations that students sometimes conflate.

Physics2D and physics materials. The Physics2D layer matrix (Project Settings → Physics 2D) determines which colliders can even interact — the single most common "why does my player fall through the floor" cause is two objects on layers that were never told to collide. Physics Materials 2D control friction and bounciness per-surface: an icy platform and a rubber platform can share a prefab and differ only in which material is assigned.

Reading a paper map as a walkable blockout. The translation step between a hand-drawn level map and a Tilemap/prefab scene: rooms become bounding boxes first, connections become doorways or gaps second, and only once the critical path is walkable does anything get dressed up. A blockout that isn't walkable yet isn't a failed milestone — a blockout that's fully decorated but has an uncrossable gap is the actual failure mode to watch for.

Connecting it to the critique

When reviewing each map today, the useful question isn't "is it pretty" but "does the map explain a design decision" — where the difficulty ramps, where a shortcut rewards exploration, where pacing intentionally slows down. A blockout that's walkable but has no discernible reason for its layout is technically complete and still worth pushing on, the same way an untuned mechanic passed Ex 2's Implementation bar without its Design decision bar.