This is a thinking out loud post, but I have been thinking a lot recently about how I am going to build my level for my game. I have also been procrastinating a lot by reading the Unity3D forum on Reddit.

There was a post on there recently where someone was asking how they could work on their game project during their nine to five job. I was surprised to see the replies were mostly negative.

Back in the day when I was a programmer, I wrote a lot of dull financial / trading esque software. I had got to the point where I could do it with my eyes closed - which often happened. No surprise that clients don’t like spending x hundred a day on a contractor for them to appear at sleep at their desk all day. So to combat this, I did two things:

Drank a blend of very strong French Arabic coffee which I now wouldn't be surprised to find out has now banned under the UN human convention against torture. Worked on small games within the software I was developing.

I should stress the word small here, mostly they were challenges I set myself. A common one was sorting a deck of cards as, from a programming perspective it is a genuinely interesting challenge, but if you have ever worked as an actuary and logged into a system to evaluate a pension portfolio only to find yourself playing a game of blackjack - that was me..

So with that in mind, could I use MS excel to generate a 3D level for Unity ? Yes, yes I can.

First things first, you will need to open Excel and make sure you have two spreadsheets in your workbook. The reason for this is; sheet 1 will be used to design your level and sheet2 will output the code for unity.









In the picture above, I have designed a copy of the Pac Man maze using "w" for walls and "d" for the dots. I have used conditional formatting to make it easier to visualise, but if you are trying to work in secret in an office, I would recommend not using this and use numbers instead of letters - no one is ever going to suspect anything if you are sitting in an office staring at a spreadsheet full of numbers - trust me.