In My Shadow is a casual puzzler at its core so naturally it would seem that the project should be a relatively short one that would not require a lot of time to be developed.
Well, that’s far from the truth and not to forget that I am not an expert developer by any means. So what happens when a mediocre developer tries to make a unique and technically challenging game – a lot of unknowns and hence a lot of delays!
In this post, I want to highlight the importance of custom tools that either fasten or automate some parts of the development process. I can’t stress enough how helpful these can be, especially if your project has a lot of cumbersome and repetitive tasks. These are a few major benefits of having such tools/scripts –
- Saves a LOT of time with small and repetitive tasks
These can build up with time and in the end you will find yourself spending a lot of time on these - Makes these tasks error free
You won’t assign a wrong variable to the field of your important scripts - Can be used by anyone, including artists and designers
Today I am sharing the biggest of them all –
The Shadow Level Editor
- Place the shadow casters from a list of available casters for that room.
- Configure those placed casters (their axis of movement, rotation and other specific attributes)
- Place the shadow objectives
- Place the shadow obstacles and set their config (movements, if any)
- Save all the above information somehow?
- Make all the level design objects (casters, objectives and obstacles) inherit from a Serializable LevelDesignObject class.
- Have all the child classes for the different types of objects, each having its own set of custom variables to be serialized.
- Have the Level editor script load these objects from either a saved json or a list of available objects to choose from.
- Adjust all the objects needed in the scene and when done, save the level via the LevelEditor script which will serialize all the required data from the loaded objects into the json file.
I will be doing a full technical tutorial sort of post after the game launch on how to make a custom Level Editor for your game. Hope you guys enjoyed the post and learnt a few new things.
If you don’t know about In My Shadow yet, it is a unique puzzle platformer in a world of shadows that are formed by emotions and memories. Learn more about it here on its site page or wishlist it on Steam
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