More than four directions

Spare me with the whole "it's been a while since I last posted" and get to the essence, I always say.

Our game Dronotype is well on it's way, and screenshots and videos will be in a future post, so in the mean time I figured I'd explain the process of designing our "Geometry Editor". Did you hear that Dronotype has a built-in Level Editor and is optimized for both Desktop AND Mobile level creation? Probably not because I never mentioned it, which Keith (you read his introduction, right?) keeps saying that there is a ton of blogging gold content that we can talk about, so sometime in the "mythical" future we'll introduce it.


As I was saying, before you distracted me, Dronotype had been designed with rooms that branch off from each other in only four directions, Up, Down, Left, and Right.

You have to remember, from our conversation at the gym, Dronotype was originally a completely different game based on similar mechanics. The idea was to create the newest clone of Flappy Bird (just kidding, it was to develop a game in 30 days), so the levels were going to be created through a very simple level editor. But as with all great ideas (i.e. sliced bread, kidney shaped pools, reclining chairs, etc...) it soon became clear that the base mechanic was completely unexplored and a very novel way to play games.

So as feature after feature began to creep in (we've been working on the game since the beginning of August 2015), we realized that the horizontal/vertical movement was not going to be enough to really represent the vision we had for this game. Introduce, the Geometry Editor, which allows us to drag and stretch textures into a barely recognizable blob of some gradient texture:

Yeah, it's that blue thing in the middle. You probably experienced the most amazing feeling just now, but let me explain what you're seeing. This piece of geometry is actually 5 quadrilaterals that are deformed and stitched together to form a sort of arc shape. I created this by manually modifying the raw level file and experimenting with the structure of the internal data. So we have a blob, so what?

Next came allowing the human being to select the object and visualize it's surface:

5-10 minutes later (this is a joke, software developers are notoriously very bad at estimating time, it was more like 5-10 hours), we can actually modify the geometry without manually editing the level file (which is very difficult):

It's starting to look like somewhat recognizable:

Notice that the bottom texture changed! Things are starting to take shape. In case you're wondering, those textures are place holders, and you guessed correctly, the blue gradient is supposed to represent snow. Look:

It sort of resembles a snowy rock arch if you squint your eyes (also stick out your tongue and make a raspberry sound.)

So that's it right? "No", I said with a resounding echo. We still do not have physics collision with the geometry. And that texture! You can't go out there looking like that! I spent approximately another hour creating a slightly better texture, experimenting with dimensions and color.

It's a basic snowy ledge shape, and the texture helps us visualize what the level will look like. Pay attention to future posts where you'll undoubtedly see this concept put to good use. Here is the wireframe, btw:

 

All in all, the Geometry object and Geometry Editor took about 20 hours to design, but it's just the beginning and the tool will evolve to meet our future needs as Dronotype comes closer to realization. 

I hope you enjoyed this post as much as I did writing it! How about some feedback?

Oh, and here is a kick ass picture of Dronotype: