Before the beginning of next semester – when we begin developing our games – I want to research certain tools or workflows we can utilize to make our games development as quick and efficient as possible.

Tile maps

What is a Tile map?

A tilemap in games is a method of building game worlds by arranging small, reusable square images called tiles onto a grid, efficiently creating large levels, backgrounds, and environments, common in 2D games

Using this in our own game will make level design and creation much faster and efficient, not having to create specialized art assets for each level. But tile maps are often associated with pixel art games, like the early Mario and Zelda games. However, tiles can be created with hand-drawn art as long as assets are able to be seamlessly repeated.

Examples of non pixel art 2D games that use tilemaps/tilesets:

• Hollow Knight
  • Tiles are used for environment collision and layouts keeping platforming mechanics consistent throughout the game
  • Modular walls, floors and background tiles are also used for visuals – Further decorative assets are used
    • These tiles are often irregularly shaped, to make it less obvious that they are tiles

Team Cherry does this so that they can re-use assets effectively, reducing their workload:

Ori and the Blind Forest/ Will of the Wisps

• Tile sets define the structure of levels, while the artwork masks the grid-like structure

This video talks about a software called Tiled that allows the user to create more in-depth rules than Unity’s tileset feature. Some things I learnt from this video are:

Modern games that use tilesets expand on versions used in older, much earlier games:

• Tiles are much larger -> Used to be 8×8 to 32×32, now they can be as big as 1024×1024
• Rule-based placement -> Tilemaps use more complicated rules to create variation visually
• Edge-blending variants -> Alternate versions of existing tiles that exist to visually blend edges between neighbouring tiles, avoiding obvious seams

Level Design

When it comes to designing platformer levels, I want to encourage beating levels as fast as possible

Platformer games that make the player beat the game as fast as possible often have levels that the player can see in its entirety, or a mechanics that allows the player to see the whole level before attempting it

Do I design levels that allow the player to see all of it in its entirety in on screen?

Or do I design larger levels (Where the camera follows the player character like a side scroller) that allow players to figure them out through repetition?

Or do I combine the two? (Seen in this section of Hollow Knight)

My Current Level Design

This current Level Design is very crude and rudimentary, it feels like I’m just placing things for the sake of it. After researching the level design in existing games, I feel like this can be vastly improved:

• For levels with very few ‘rest points’ having the camera follow the player like this, makes seeing the rest of the level very difficult
  • I could add a camera offset depending on what direction the player is facing to show the player more of the level
  • I could make the entire level visible on the screen at once
  • Make certain sections of the level visible at once depending on where the ‘rest points’ / ‘check points’ are

How should I design levels in the future?

I think that I should combine all 3 approaches to create constantly new and refreshing platforming experiences. Whichever approach seems to fit the player’s unlocked movement abilities and the per-level mechanics, should be what I aim for. But figuring it out is definitely the hard part – but I’m glad I’m thinking/ considering this stuff ahead of time.

Parallax

Being a 2D game, the only way we can have the illusion of depth – to make the game feel more immersive – is to use a parallax effect, but what is it?
Parallax is the apparent shift in an object’s position when viewed from two different locations or perspectives. But in games it is a visual technique where background layers move at different speeds than foreground layers, creating an illusion of depth and making a flat 2D scene feel more immersive and three-dimensional:

This video will teach me how to use the background assets that Paula makes to create the illusion of depth:

Level Assets

With all of this in mind, Paula and I wrote notes on how she would begin creating assets with everything we had researched:

Per-Island Design

Each Island will have its own ‘theme’ to avoid the gameplay feeling stale – this will impact the visuals and movement mechanics of the level.
For example:

The player starts (Bottom left) on the beach, having travelled there via the ocean. They then traverse ‘rooms’ to reach the top of the island’s Volcano/Mountain to retrieve a piece of the player character’s magical fish hook. Restoring a movement ability and removing the magic that effected the island (Causing the ‘Per-island movement function’

One example I had thought of was a ‘Coral Island’ where the magical fish hook piece caused the island to be infected with corals. Effecting the visuals, and creating bubble columns that the player can ‘fly’ up (Being the ‘Per-island movement function’ of this specific island).

References:

“Level Editing made easy with Automapping”

AdamCYounis (2022). Level editing made easy with Automapping. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXeCCvGgHhk.

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“Hollow Knight – Path of Pain Speedrun”

MonStahLer (2017). Hollow Knight – Path of Pain Speedrun – Done in 2:29.9. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QnLG-JEzzU.

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“Unity 2D Background Parallax Effect”

Raycastly (2023). Unity 2D Parallax Background Effect in 100 Seconds. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEy-kIGE-lI.

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