Game Development- Introduction. Blog Post – 5

This week, there has not been much coding, but i have continued to work slightly with the soundmanager and soundeffects for the game. The parts that i had put more time on this week are level design and a tutorial for the game.

As the Final presentation is about 2 weeks from now, we needed to start build several levels to the game. In our design document, we had written that the game will contain 4 floors/ 4 levels. But probably we will change that to 3 levels + one tutorial level insted. We decided to have a tutorial level because we got very positive feedback from the playtesting this monday, since we had a small tutorial before the actual gameplay.There were many who thought it was great, but we should change/develop it a bit .Making a good tutorial is somthing that working on, because otherwise can some parts of the game be unclear for the player what to do in some situations. What we want is to learn the player as much as possible in the tutorial without getting it too long or even boring. We are also thinking about making the tutorial to a start of a storyline into the game.That way we can make it clearer for the player what the game is all about.

So i have started to build the actual level for the tutorial of the game. But since our tilemap system is very confusing when you are buliding larger maps it became very tough to track all the tiles positions. Also putting out walls and props is a pain in the ass.( You can read about our “tilemap system” here: http://kalleplanka.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/game-development-introduction-blog-post-1/ ).

Luckily did Sebastian (with guidelines from William’s editor) been able to create an editor for the game where you can place and remove tiles/walls and soon also props. You can of course save the level/map you created, that’s the whole point with our editor,but also load files to edit them. This made it much easier to build levels and saves time. The work you do in 1 hour without the editor can you now do in around 5-10 minutes with the editor.(Saves a lot of time).

The picture above shows our editor where i have started to build the tutorial level. Right now you can only click out tiles and walls.

That’s it! Thanks for reading and stay aaawesome!