Level Designer Revamp

Hey everyone, I'm sorry I missed last Sunday's post!
The video update is not yet ready, I'm going to try my best to get it done for next Monday. There are a couple of reasons for this but the main one is that I've decided to make some big changes to the game's level design process and this has taken up most of my time. 

Kobold
Progress on the Kobold is going well! The art assets are now in the game and its mechanics are almost complete. Something we might still add to it is a tail but this won't be until I've got the basics finished and the problems ironed out. The biggest problem by far is the legs. They are much better than they have been before but there is still something weird about them. I think it might be because the body is not affected by their movement so I might try adding a subtle bobbing motion to the body. Either way, this is going to be a very fun enemy to infest and fight with when it's done!

Level Design
As I've mentioned before, I have created a specialised level designer project for Squillamorph. The output from this designer is a set of images, one for each layer of the level. Up until this point, I have thought this would benefit us because we could directly edit the level in Photoshop. However, the downsides of this method have begun to outweigh the positive aspects. I'll list a few: The time it takes to make a level with the current method is way too long, the process is complicated, the output images are massive, tweaking the design takes too long, and I had to write a really complicated guide to be able to use it. To sum it up, it needs to change.

I've spent a large amount of time creating a new and much simpler level designer. This one doesn't use any overly complicated image rendering, which means the levels will now use lots of smaller sprites and tile-maps instead of a few large sprites. So far, I've been able to almost finish remaking the existing levels, which already shows how much faster it is to use. I've also been able to use a few parts of the old designer, which has helped.

Although I put a large amount of time into something that isn't needed anymore, I did learn a huge amount while making the old designer.

New Level Effects
The new level design process allows us to easily make more layers of parallax. However, my existing parallax system wasn't great. So, I did some research and found a much better method that we can even use in the editor to place parallax assets more accurately. 

Another new effect I am testing is depth of field. This isn't a custom effect, but one in the Unity post processing stack. We might be using it to help convey depth in the levels now we have more control over the placement of individual assets.


That's it for this post! There's about the same amount as a 1 week progress post because I was running and taking part in a game jam this past week! I really enjoyed it and learnt a few things that I'll can do for Squillamorph.
Hope you like the progress we've made, thanks for reading!