Easy level making

Hi! In todays blogpost I would like to talk about how we made our levels in A Rat Betwixt.
The levels are designed around the game being square-grid based and around the overlooking camera angle.
The first step to creating  a room for the level is whiteboxing an idea in the engine. The one I am showing today ended up looking like this:

map01.png
The whiteboxed room in the engine shot from straight above

As you can see in the picture I have left room for an entrance and an exit. You can also see that the entire room is filled with green squares. The reason it looks like this is because the way we made collision work in the game.
The collision of the room as well as the enemies is programmed in to the square grid, where we can see green is where we can step, under the white boxes we find red, inpasseble squares. You can read more about the grid system in our programmer Linus Bjernhagen’s post about it here: https://linusbjernhagendevelop.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/spawning-and-entities/

The picture you see above was used as a reference in order to make the level in 3dsmax. In 3dsmax I made some planes, 2 different sizes for the walls, 2 different for the floor and 2 for the top of the walls. I then made a texture set of them and then used those pieces, together with 3dsmax snap function as puzzle pieces and built the rest of the level. By doing this I get a repeating texture that is ridiculously low performance in the engine. The downside of it is of course that the level becomes very same looking.

levelmax.png
The level built in 3dsmax. I marked some planes to give a perspective on it.

The walls you see as black most towards us in every room is invisible from this view in the engine. The entire room is about 800 tris and the texture set for it is just one 512×512 set. So it is very cheap in performance.

levellit.png
The level in the engine, lit and with some props.

And here we have the finished result in the engine. So as expected it looks somewhat boring,but you can’t forget that this is just a simple begining of a level, the first step.  The walls and floors can easily be replaced in the engine as well as in the max file in order to get more interesting details. If you don’t want to do that you can fill the floow with different props. You can also make textures of posters, mold, grime, bullet holes or whatever and place right over the existing walls. So as it looks right now may not be the most interesting piece, but it is just a start.
Well that’s all for this blogpost, thanks – Sakarias ‘Rostfritt’ Ståhl

About Sakarias Ståhl

2015 Graphics