Level design in full swing

While Ed fights the hardware, I was able to complete two more level layouts for the introductory part of our game (teaching about controls, interaction, puzzle solving etc).
One basic puzzle might look like this:

Easy stuff, but my pholosophy is, the easier You can drag the player into the game, the better, and I am all for seamless transition while providing actual gameplay.

"Press A to jump" for no purpose has...no purpose, so we put the learning phase right there into the gameplay from second one.

At the same time, Ed came up with a brilliant idea how to trace the layouts in our "DyEd" editor, to create them quickly and easily and be able to make changes without pain.

Fun times ahead.

Level Design

After dabbling in Photoshop, I decided for exchange reasons to use OpenOffice Draw for the basic layout of our levels.
Tip for Mac users: when trying to drag-copy and paste an item in OO Draw, use the "Alt" key, not "ctrl" to drag-copy an item :)


I am working from rough to detailed, thus laying out a rough concept of the structure, exchanging it with Ed and adding illustrations where possible and required, then moving on to flesh out the details.

At this point its interesting to add story "locations" and events to the layout, so the game flow can be demonstrated.
Its equally important to make as many annotations as possible, so the team can work from that instead of guessing.

Emm


Ed: Well I am working on making the atlas packer faster now, this will be for the tile reservoirs and allow us to make as best use as possible for all our tiles. I will be increasing the tile reservoirs tile areas to 1024  by 1024 for this purpose. On the while the system will now work quicker and more efficiently with the new packing system over the old one once I get it to my satisfaction I will be sending Emm a new build with the new file systems and tile systems.