Streamlining Creativity: Custom Level Design Tool in Unity
We developed a Unity tool for Lost Twins 2 that enabled designers to easily create and visualize level designs, ensuring they met technical specs for seamless game integration.
Service
Game Engineering
Title
Lost Twins 2
Client
Playdew - Our Indie Friends
Timeline
2019
A puzzle platformer
Lost Twins 2 is a level based puzzle adventure game with beautiful visuals. Each level consists of multiple puzzle pieces that can be moved around to connect with each other in specific combinations. The inside of each puzzle piece contains a platformer like experience with complete environments and interactable objects. There are 2 playable characters in every level that can interact with the environment, collect items, as well as move between connected puzzle pieces. The goal is to lead both these characters to the final location in every level, at which point the level is complete and the player progresses to the next level.
Design Elements
Puzzles solving is a major part of this game design. It involves sliding puzzle mechanism where each piece can only move in two dimension ( vertically and horizontally ). The pieces can connect with each other in multiple combinations. Some of these combinations allow the player characters to move between puzzle pieces, which is an important part of the journey towards completing a level. So having interesting puzzle designs as well as engaging platformer environment designs, is essential for a good gameplay experience.
Levels at scale
Since its a level based game, the design involves creating a large number of good levels. This demand would continue to exist after the release, for future updates. This highlighted the need for a system that lets the designers quickly produce captivating level designs.
The Level Designer
We created a custom tool inside Unity to let the designers create and iterate on the level designs. It allows the designers to visualize all the puzzle pieces, as well as the gameplay area inside each puzzle piece. The designer tool makes it easy to create interesting designs while also ensuring that the designs meet all the technical specifications required for final integration of every level into the game.
Smooth Development Process
This results in a clear understanding of the level designs between all the contributing disciplines, i.e. design, art and engineering. The design and development process becomes frictionless and it greatly reduces the risk of running into time taking issues and error fixing during later stages.
Art Asset Production
The designs created by the level design tool are used by the art team to produce high quality environments and art assets. At this stage it is easier to produce assets that closely match all the elements in the level designs. The rate of design conformance is high. That also translates to fewer issues further down the development pipeline.
Integration into the Game
Since the levels are produced using our own design tool, it is a straightforward process to integrate them into the game. The error rate is low and the process is quick. This also has advantages for the art asset integration process. Since the art assets are also based on these spec-adhering designs, the whole integration process flows smoothly and swiftly.
Lost Twins II
Using this and other similar tools to help the development team at multiple stages, we are able to avoid potential pitfalls and resource drains throughout the game development process.
Words from
friends.
Lets talk games
Discover the potential of your project. Contact us today to explore how we can transform your vision into successful reality
connect@werplay.com
