To go with our pixel art characters, the 3D model “tiles” are made in a voxel editor. My only complaint about GridMaps is the lack of autotiling, but that’s something we’ve learned to live with. They automatically batch draw calls for their meshes, and make setting up the physics of tiles super easy. They’re a great way to rapidly build a map up from a collection of meshes. GridMaps work sort of like 3 dimensional versions of tilemaps used in 2D games. Godot has many advantages (and disadvantages) over the alternatives, but one thing we’ve really enjoyed using is its GridMaps. Since we announced the project, we’ve made no secret of the fact that we’ve been using Godot to develop it. Of course, it goes without saying that each path must also have something to make it worth travelling! Using Godot The loops these paths set up serve to gently guide the player back towards the paths they missed. What the barriers do is set up alternative paths, which creates player choice, and a reason to backtrack. If New Wirral Park was basically flat with no barriers, you’d pass through it in 30 seconds, see barely 10% of it, and never look back. The flow network for New Wirral Park, showing the unique paths through the area. You could walk across it in a minute or two if there was nothing in your way–and that’s exactly the thing: barriers create the feeling of the space!
Using the A Link to the Past example again (a frequent point of reference for us!), Hyrule manages to feel big despite being only 256 tiles wide. This was a trick we picked up by analysing other games. More routes through the area–especially loops and one-way paths–give it a sense of “having a lot of stuff”. It was important to get it to feel like an interesting location with lots of things to do and discover.Įarly, very professional, designs for New Wirral Park.Ī typical way we evaluate a design is by tracing out the flow network. New Wirral Park especially went through many iterations, both because it’s early in the game, and because it acts as a gateway to 4-5 other areas. These go through several reviews and iterations before we commit to a design. That’s how the “high-level” design helps us.įrom that high-level design, we drill down to more detailed sketches of individual areas. We can only ensure those concentric loops become traversable if we figure out how the chunks fit together ahead of time. Like Rome, all most roads lead to Harbourtown!
#Starmancer wiki series
One of the ways we plan to achieve that is to design the world as a series of concentric loops that converge on the town. For that reason, a lot of our design iteration takes place in PNGs and on paper before anything is implemented into the game!Ī second reason to plan a high level design holistically like this is that we want Harbourtown to function as a sort of hub that the player will revisit over and over. We’re not Nintendo, we’re just two guys, so we necessarily have to be cautious with how we spend our time. For reference, that makes the size of New Wirral equal to two of Hyrule from A Link to the Past side-by-side. The overworld is split the world up into a grid of 16×8 evenly-sized chunks of 32×32 tiles to make it manageable. Spoilery bits are blurred out! The rest of this post focuses on the New Wirral Park area.Īlthough Cassette Beasts is a 3D game (or 2.5D if you like), the fixed camera angle and grid-based terrain mean that maps are mostly designed as if for a 2D top-down game. The high-level design of the overworld, an island called New Wirral. More up-front planning helps us avoid those mistakes. There are many reasons for this, but mostly we’re very aware that with the scale of the world we have planned, small mistakes can add up to a mountain of work at the end. low detail) design for the entire overworld. DesignĪll our level design starts at the top, with a “high-level” (i.e.
#Starmancer wiki software
Putting together a game like this with only two full-time developers is no easy feat, so we wanted to show a bit of our process, and how we’re able to use technology and software to put it all together! New Wirral Park, the first major open area you arrive at after the tutorial in Cassette Beasts. Hey folks! We wanted to show off a bit of how Cassette Beasts operates “under the hood”.
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