I have been working on a new project where the player must pilot a robot through a space station, dodging obstacles and solving puzzles to reach the end goal. I know how to design and program the assets, but I am finding difficulty creating the levels.

I am making a tile-based game. To do so, I have created tilemaps and prefabs so I can drag and drop tiles and obstacles into the scene, and then position them so they match the grid. I try to make the scene represent my sketches for the level. However, this process gets very tedious and time consuming, meaning I am unable to make as much progress as I would like.

Given this, does anybody have advice for making tile based games in Unity? Are there extensions that I can get from the asset store or a more efficient way to design levels that I do not know about? Also, what do you other developers do to make level creation easier?

http://rotorz.com/tilesystem/

I had the same problem, taking a long time to create levels one tile at a time. So i coded a level editor, somewhat like a paint program but that works with tiles instead of colors/brushes. Coding the editor was extra work but sure worth it in the the long run, especialy if you include the editor in your game for players to use and create their custom levels.

You can add all kinds of functionality to your editor. You mention draging items to match the grid. You could include a toggle button to "snap" objects to the grid. Mouse right click toggle between two commonly used tiles, etc.

Hope this inspires you.