How to play only the active scene when entering Play Mode?

Question

Complete Unity novice here. First project ever, trying to get familiar and understand the basic aspects of game development with Unity. Trying to work with scenes now.

I have two scenes in my Hierarchy view. I added both to the Build Settings.

The MainScene contains the player sprite and the main game elements, while the TitleScene contains the game name text and a progress bar.

I set TitleScene as the active scene using the option Set Active Scene in the ellipsis context menu of the scene element in the Hierarchy view.

I want to show only one scene on game start, the TitleScene.

The TitleSceneLogic.cs script is attached to a game object in the TitleScene

public class TitleSceneLogic : MonoBehaviour
{    
    void Start()
    {
        print("Title Scene started");
    }
}

The MainSceneLogic.cs script is attached to a game object in the MainScene

public class MainSceneLogic : MonoBehaviour
{    
    void Start()
    {
        print("Main Scene started");
    }
}

Every time I hit Play to see the game running:

• Both scenes are being shown (overlapping)
• Console panel shows both Main Scene started and Title Scene started.

Is this really the default behavior in Unity, to load all scenes when the game starts?

I need to show one scene only on game start, the TitleScene.

I gave it a shot by adding this to the MainSceneLogic.cs's Start function

SceneManager.LoadScene("TitleScene");

and indeed only the title scene is shown now, but:

• I have the feeling this is not the right way, do I really have to manually load a specific scene in the code when the game starts?
• The logs:
  • Title Scene started
  • Main Scene Started
  • Title Scene started

What is the right way to load only one scene on game start?

Answer 1

I have two scenes in my Hierarchy view. I added both to the Build Settings.

The easier way is to have only one scene in the hierarchy.

From the documentation:

If you need to create large streaming worlds or want to effectively manage multiple scenes at runtime, you can open and edit multiple scenes in the Unity Editor simultaneously. Having multiple scenes open at once also lets you improve the workflow, especially if you often have to edit scenes collaboratively.

But for a normal small start game, one scene at a time is the default work flow.

As you found out, you can switch scenes with SceneManager.LoadScene("Your scene name");. In the build settings you set which scene should load first.