One of the first thing that we solved after getting the basic mechanics working, was creating levels. We knew that if we wanted this to work, we had to have polished levels that were enjoyable. A quick level editor would be sweet.

Sadly, I didn’t have time to create a level editor. So we did the next best thing: we created the levels in Maya. This was amazing for 2 reasons:
1) The artist had more time than I had, I was kinda busy coding features.
2) Testing levels was blazing fast. Don’t like a level? Delete and rebuild.

What we did was create a default cube, this cube would be the same one as the artist would use in Maya. The script I wrote would read out all the level meshes from a certain directory and loop over all the cubes in that mesh. If these are named “Sticky” or “Bouncy”, they would be tagged in the script as their respective type. Simple and easily expandable. The only downside my script had was that it doesn’t allow for a single level to be reloaded, it would have to go over all the levels to rebuild them. The process only takes half a minute or so, so this wasn’t worth the time to fix.

On average we went through 3-4 iterations of each level, with some exceptions (level 9 and 16 come to mind, they were probably changed at least 8 times).

Play Go Back here

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 at 4:07 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.