The Elf Who Killed Christmas - Video Game Development Blog: Level 2 Design: From Design to Game

Mike developed the Give Up Games Scene Designer so that objects can be exported from the Scene Designer into .fbx files, which can then be imported into Maya to finalize.

Because the Scene Designer, and the level designer only, ultimately, export boxes, there is a lot of tedious resolution that needs to be cleaned up. The first time that I actually saw the whole level in this fashion, I couldn't really read it, or make sense of what I was looking at. You can see from the wire frame, and the shaded images here, that without knowing anything previously, it was difficult for me to make sense of the design.

However, after talking to Mike, and a few modifications to Give Up Games Tile Editor, I was finally able to see the level for what it was. (The first thing I had to do was take out the ceilings so that they didn't obsure the view.

I had to edits or re-build the level and make the art assets to be used in the game. Because there are so many boxes from the Tile Editor, these boxes had to be combined. Further, whereas boxes have six sides, walls in game levels don't need all of these sides, so they had to be deleted to make the level more efficient. In a couple of cases, the actual geometry generated from the Give Up Games Tile Editor is actually used in the final game for the physics.

Because of the nature of the factory level, this is one of the levels where Give Up Games Tile Editor geometry was very helpful, and could even be used to prototype, built on top of, and stylized. This is because Level 2 is very much a man-made construction. However, in a more organic level, like Level 1 or Level 3, very little of the original prototype geometry would be used. (The pipe area of Level 2 is a good example of where the shape of boxes was changed to create a more interesting shape than simple boxes.)

Later, in order to make the level run more efficient in the Give Up Game Engine, I had to break out each of the separate areas in the level so that they could be turned off when the player does not see the area.

(You can read THIS PREVIOUS BLOG ENTRY to see how these areas look from the player's perspective, and ANOTHER PREVIOUS BLOG ENTRY to see the factory area.)

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