New Prefab Workflows 1/4: 2D Level Design With Tilemap and Nested Prefabs

Improved workflow

The new Prefab workflows, which are now available as previews, allow you to split up scenes and Prefabs on a granular level. This gives you greater flexibility, increases your productivity and enables you to work confidently without worrying about making time-consuming errors.

The improvements are based on surveys with more than 150 enterprise customers, numerous interviews, several usability tests and two game jams. The long-term goal has been not only to implement support for nesting, but to rethink the core Prefab workflows so different team members can simultaneously edit Prefabs confidently and efficiently.

Nesting

Previously, users were forced to choose between creating large monolithic Prefabs, like buildings, or more granular ones, like pieces of furniture, but they couldn't do both.

Now with support for nested Prefabs, a large building can be made up of many smaller room Prefabs, which in turn can be made up of multiple pieces of furniture Prefabs, and so on.

This makes it easier for teams of all sizes to:

Split up Prefabs into multiple entities for greater efficiency
Reuse any content, from small to large
Work on different parts of content simultaneously
Learn more
Prefab Variants
Flexible properties increase efficiency
As a default, a Prefab Variant inherits the objects and properties of the Prefab it is a variant of, but at the same time, you have the possibility to override those properties. This is similar to the concept of inheritance in object-oriented programming.

For example, if you had multiple door Prefabs, you could choose to make some of them a different color, while allowing the rest to inherit the existing Prefab color property. Any change made to the original door Prefab will affect the variants of it as well, except those properties which have been overridden.

Prefab Mode
Avoid time-consuming mistakes
A cornerstone of the new workflows, Prefab Mode enables you to edit in isolation. While this means that you will have to approach Prefab editing in a slightly different way, you can feel secure that any errors made will not have negative consequences.

[Jindo]

I've been working with Unity since one of the early versions, and I really appreciate that the team took their time getting this right despite how long people have been asking for it.

[MarllonVilano]

Waiting for this for a long time, and in my point of view, the wait is being worth it. Thanks, Unity Technologies.

[Deverydoo]

I love the features and the new workflow. I also really love that level generator !~

[RobsonFilho]

As those tools keep improving we, developers, will do better work as society grow

[anubaddy]

I'm Glad that I pause the video to see your bookmark bar and end up at "immersivemath" What a fantastic site to learn and polish up maths. Thanks a lot

[achuth]

Thank you Unity
You guys are awesome😙

I was really waiting for this new feature

[KeashiKrios]

I like that he's using AdBlock on Unity web :D

[benjoe]

Who else wanted to accept the cookie policy on the Unity page in the video? -.-"

[Eviltaku]

This has been a long time coming! But I do have a question. How will this work with the new ECS system?

[letsplaymithannes]

Can someone help me with the level generator what was shown in the video, where do you get the script from?

[betiknow]

Can i use this asset in commercial game?

[Peayan]

Is your Level 2 prefab just a copy of your Level 1 prefab but with adjusted tiles? If so, how do you avoid having duplicate tilemaps show up in your TileMap Palette? I'm developing a 2D Rogue game which will require 'room' based designs to be chosen randomly by a level generator.

I require a total of 8 layers (tilemaps) per room and making a 'room' prefab seems to always spawn an additional 8 tilemaps (as you'd expect) so I was wondering if this is the outcome for your project or there's another way to handle duplicate prefabs referencing the same set of tilemaps, cheers.

[Zzzxxx]

Does Unity not solve the stutter problem? I contacted the Unity bug team, but they have no answer.

[programad]

What is the asset tiles he used for this tutorial?

[TamalPlays]

where can I get the level generator script?

[ParaDiceV]

seems to not be compatible with 2D game kit

[АндрейПавлов-жх]

Бля, почему разрабов наших на unity нету, бесит.