Posted September 17, 2023 by georgie
Implementation
This week's implementation primarily focused on basic level blocking. For this checkpoint, I designed a basic, grassy arena with the use of Cainos' topdown tileset. These tilesets are a beautiful collection representing elements such as grass, flowers, cobblestone paths, statues and other stone-textured object. The decision to utilise pre-made tilesets, rather than hand-drawn ones, was to save time, and also ensure visual consistency in the background visuals - something I am still gaining experience in. In the previous iteration, I intended to create a fully hand-drawn background, but knew that constant trial and error in drawing the level would impede on the timely progress required to meet the weekly game development checkpoints.
Examples of Cainos' tilesets.
Once the tilesets were imported, I used Unity's built-in Sprite Editor to slice them into individual sprites. These sprites were then added to the Tile Palette, wherein I could paint tiles onto the scene view to my heart's content! The Tile Palette provides an intuitive, streamlined interface for selecting and placing tiles; the process is further sped-up by using a tablet pen. To draw onto the scene view, I used a Grid game object, which serves as the main canvas for tiles. Beginning with the arena's basic shape, a rectangle, the arena was then filled with variations of grass, cobblestone paths, and flowers from the grass tileset. On a separate grid object, decorations were added, with the grid size increased so that these objects were larger in scale.
To enforce level boundaries and restrict characters from exiting the play area, an Edge Collider 2D component was added to the Tilemap object. This collider serves as an invisible barrier, preventing objects from moving beyond the level's borders. Being polygonal in nature, this collider can be adjusted as the shape of the arena changes. Likewise, the decoration game object utilised a Tilemap Collider 2D, so that any character with their own collider would simply bump into obstacles placed via the palette, rather than walk through.
As this arena is intended to serve as the game's world, the level design will be expanded, with the colour palette adjusted to align with the original vision of the game (and have no fear - the original artist says we are free to edit the tiles to our desire!).
A demonstration of the tilemap level blocking; note that some pixel details have been lost in the .gif.
User Feedback / Improvements
User Feedback was obtained via peer review threads on Discord, wherein I asked for suggestions on how to improve the visuals of the area. Here are the main points:
Alternative Approaches
References
Cainos. 2021. Pixel Art Top Down - Basic. Accessed 12 September 2023. <https://cainos.itch.io/pixel-art-top-down-basic>