For my Independent Learning requirement I took a Lynda course called Level Design Basics in Unity.  The course was exactly what the title suggests, and it was very helpful because, at least to me, one of the hardest things about Unity is figuring out the basic stuff. Most of the time I know what I want to do I just don't know where to find the thing or what to change, and once I learn the basics I can play around and put the concepts together, but if the basics are off then it's all downhill. The course first talked about creating custom mesh colliders and custom meshes in general, which proved to be very useful in my projects as I needed to put some 3D text on the billboard at the beginning, but the problem is that if you put 3D text anywhere you can see it through everything including the walls and the ground, so I had to create a different material that I could use so the text will not always be visible. It also talked about how in any level, you have to build the path before actually laying out the level: "we want the player to have a mission and be able to go find it and succeed at it. Even in an open world where everyone can simply run around theres usually some kind of mission or direction we could put in.” I thought about that when I was making the maze and realized that I should first build the actual path of success for the player and then build all of the alternate routes that lead to failure rather than just making a grid and then deciding where the person is going to go. He also said that to lay out the level, "what we want to do is use ways that are naturally occurring…such as hills," and this was something I took into consideration until I had to make the whole thing flat because in the Oculus you cannot jump (this will make more sense if you read my other blog post about the final project.), “we want to avoid trapping the player in some way that’s awkward, we want to avoid simply putting up walls.” It also talked about setting up prefabs and I never really knew what those were until this video but they are very helpful because then you can just refer back to those instead of building the thing new all over. A prefab in Unity is a defined collection of an object or objects plus lights, materials, scripts and anything else we'd like to associate with it, so basically if you are going to be using something more than once and you modified it and changed it around, if you make a prefab you can keep using that instead of having to re-modify the object all the time. Overall this was an interesting course and there were some things I learned that definitely were helpful and just overall made me think a little bit differently as I was doing my final project.