Level Design

[leafy]

I'm going to be posting some of my level concepts here, as well as some other ones drawn by my friends.

Levels by Phenomist:

Spoiler for Level set one:

Spoiler for What is this I don't even:

[DJ Omnimaga]

Nice so far. Make sure the early levels aren't too hard. It's best to make sure the difficulty gradually increase so we don't end up stuck at lv 3 then easily beat lv 8, 9, 10, etc.

Also do you know Phenomist in person? I noticed he joined

[phenomist]

Yep, I'm here. I'm a random guy at school who was recruited to draw maps. Since I think leafiness0 knows how to draw easy levels by himself, I provided relatively difficult maps

Once he announced that scrolling maps were possible, I sent him a really large map (probably around 120x160 tiles?) that would be Flash-game worthy. Too bad I misheard his 256x256 claim in tiles, instead of pixels.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Lol ok . Well good luck to both of you for the project. Do you program, by the way?

[phenomist]

Yeah, but I don't really have nearly as much dedication as leafiness does, so obviously my games are going to be worse. I created a tower climber game where the strategy is to... button-mash. I'll attach it into a topic later, I guess. Currently I'm working on a fun 2-player mode, but first I have to learn grayscale, lol.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Ah I see. Yeah it takes quite a bit of dedication to code large games, plus some people are less interested in programming than others, so that happens. I hope you enjoy your stay around here by the way.

[leafy]

Ok phenomist I uploaded your super massive level of intensity.

[phenomist]

Spoiler for 50x51 tile to "madness level":

(Cut down a bit on the right due to space issues. Note that the far far right might not actually work, but can be easily fixed)

EDIT: Changed layout a bit, added spike direction, added wraparound house (@leafiness: you can delete that part if you want)

Spoiler for 50x51 tile to "madness level" v2.0:

[phenomist]

[question: when can I start attaching stuff?]

More smaller maps, on leafiness0's request:

Spoiler for A variety of maps:

I'd like comments on level quality, because I'm churning them out quite quickly.

[z80man]

I noticed that in the madness level you can reach the finish by going through less than half of the map. A suggestion to allow the player to go through the entire map would be to move lock 6 to the bottom center. Replace lock 5 with wall and key 5 with key 6. Then replace key 6 with key 4. Lastly move key seven to the upper right. Hope this helps. Good work btw, I can't wait to see scrolling screenshots.

Spoiler for modified map:

[phenomist]

Hm, actually I intended the gap between 7 and marked 6 to be a horiz-only gate, but it appears I lost a spike somewhere (4 squares left of key 7), lol.

Your way works too. Maybe they'll be two separate levels [Title: Deja Vu?]

However, leafiness0 hasn't implemented keys yet, so both level ideas are temporarily thrown out atm.

[DJ Omnimaga]

WOAH! THose levels look awesome! I didn't thought they would be so large. I like large levels like that. I hope they can be put in the game without too much hassle. I wonder if the scrolling would be hard to implement...

[z80man]

@leafiness what is the size in memory of a tile token. I'm not sure if it would fit in your code, but half a byte for each tile might work. That would really help cut the amount of memory needed because if you use a byte for tile size the madness level would take 2550 bytes. With half a byte it is only 650 bytes.

[DJ Omnimaga]

I definitively think that half-bytes would be the best. It doesn't seem you use more than 16 tiles anyway. The only issue would probably be if you have smooth scrolling: it might be a bit slower if you redraw the entire map every frame.

[z80man]

On a secret project I'm working on now. The map data is stored as half a byte. But when you load a map to play it is uncompressed to a byte allowing it to be updated faster. I do this also because in game play each tile has far more than 16 possibilities.