Keyboard Shortcuts: Keeping Your Sanity When Creating a Level
Making a level from scratch takes time, especially if you are new to it. However, there are some nifty and life saving strategies and key bindings that will make it significantly faster to create organic levels.
First off, Ctrl.
Ctrl can be used to increment your transforms and rotations. This is especially useful for making walls and floors as you can easily hit rotate them to snap into each other!
Ctrl does the same thing for the Transforms (physically moving the object’s position) and its scaling; though the scaling one is less practical.
Next, Vertex Mode.
If you have ever used Maya or any other modern modeling software, you are likely familiar with Vertex mode. Holding V when editing an objects Transform allows you to select a vertex and then snap it to another vertex on a separate gameobject.
Lastly, changing the Pivot point for rotations.
When making sets of walls, it is common to Ctrl+D to duplicate a large chunk of wall, then flip it 180 degrees and reuse it for the other side of the room. However, in the default Pivot mode, this does not always give the desired outcome, as each item is individually rotated on its own axis.
On the top of the screen you can select “Center” mode to fix this!
Now look at the rotations!
There are plenty more useful shortcuts, but I will reference them as they become necessary moving forward on level design!
