My main objective of this period was to help the team put together a functional demo of the game with key mechanics in place. One of our key problems up until this point has been gameplay and level design, so it was important to make sure we had something specific to help us with this issue.
With this in mind, I went about creating a tool to make our level design much easier. This would be used for placing and replacing our modular assets into the scene. Tools like this are created in the industry and are where most improvements to time consuming tasks are made. Without a tool for placing objects quickly in the world, we would need to manually adjust values to make them fit together. Furthermore, If somebody else wanted to change something, they would not know the values another person has used. All in all, without a level creation tool, changing level layouts or adding new features in the scene can be an extremely intensive task and can restrict design options heavily.
Video. 1: A Demo of Level Construction using the created Tool
The tool created was used off the basis of a general purpose one on the Unity Asset store, however it wasn't adapted for our modular assets and I spent some time making sure we could create a grid fixed to our scale. Building level editor tools can have a negative effect as more time gets spent working on the tool than actually building the game. I kept this in mind as I was adapting it; to make sure it does the bare minimum we need for quick level creation. If there are other features later on which we want to use the tool for, then we can go about adding them at that time. The important thing to note is that the tool has the capability to whatever we need, should we need it to.
Fig. 1: The Created Scene with the Level Editor Tool
I learned a lot about how building tools like this can be extremely effective on work flow, as I was able to rebuild our scene within the space of an hour. Using the tool also helped me learn what was required from the artists to follow a more "grid-like" structure with their assets. It has helped us re-design the flow of the game and will continue to aid our development as more features get added towards release.
As mentioned before, future goals with this tool would be to use it for more than just level construction, and perhaps use it for environmental decoration and scenery editing. However generally those features require more finesse and precision placing rather than a grid placement. Aside from the editor which works fantastically, aims for next period are to start looking into specific AI behaviours and working on finishing our game loop for a solid demo play-through.