In this week's update: new types of grenades, and a word on modding / level editing tools!

Posted by benitosub on Jan 31st, 2015

Hello fellow IndieDB’ers !

This week I am posting the update while sick with a high fever, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I go slightly off-track ^^’

As usual we start with some new weapons (just 2 more after these, then we are finished, promise!), or rather new variations of an existing weapon: the fire grenade and the lightning grenade:

The fire grenade works just as the regular grenade, except it spawns a massive fireball upon impact:

It can be pretty useful to set things on fire which are outside of the range of your flamethrower (ok so in this case it’s a bit ridiculous, I could’ve just inched forward, but the capture window size is limited :D).

The lightning grenade on the other hand spawns a bolt of lightning which will send electric jolts down all neighboring targets, whether they be objects or enemies:

For the second part of this update, we thought we’d take you a bit behind the scenes, and show you how we put our levels together.

When brainstorming which features we wanted our tools to have - i.e., what we would use them for and how -, we came up with the following set of requirements:

- ability to create multi-layered tilemaps

- ability to easily place enemies in the level

- ability to easily place items / props in the level

- ability to easily place and edit lights in the level

- ability to assign loot to particular items / enemies

- ability to place triggers

Furthermore, if this summer’s demo is well received and we manage to secure funding to complete the game, we would really love for players to be able to mod the game as much as possible, therefore we felt the editor should be as easy and straightforward to use, even for non-experienced level designers!

With regards to the first step, the creation of the tile map, we knew there were already quite a few tools available out there - good tools! - so instead of re-inventing the wheel, we decided to evaluate a few of them, and ended up settling on Tiled (which I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with!). Why Tiled? It’s got a community, is somewhat well established, and has an open format which contains all the layer / tile / etc information that we needed ^^ ( Mapeditor.org )

For the remaining steps however, we created our own little tool to accomodate our needs. It all starts with dragging a TMX tile map into the editor:

Maps are comprised of several layers (pictured here, 2…):

You can easily pan around the map:

Once you have imported a tile map, you will need a dictionary of possible items and enemies for the level, so you have props etc to place around. This is also done by dragging an “item dictionary file” into the editor (this one is created using another in-house little tool which we may also show at some point if ppl express interest ^^’):

Once your items and enemies dictionary is loaded, you can start placing things around. It’s really just as easy as drag and drop:

Obivously you can zoom in and out, select entities, move them around, remove them, etc.:

Placing enemies is accomplished in a similar fashion:

As well as light sources:

That’s it for this week! I really hope everybody enjoyed it ^^ Next week we’ll showcase some new game mechanics again, so stay tuned for more!

Cheers!