Weekly Devlog 2 : Basic Level Blocking

WELCOME TO WEEKLY DEVLOG OF EXILE'S ADVENTURE. 

It's second episode of this series and the second thing i would introduce to you is BASIC LEVEL BLOCKING.

Why did I choose this for implementing?

In an ARPG game, level is absolutely one element that is very important. Specifically, in Exile's Adventure, the character will be defaulted to being in a special world. Therefore, it is very necessary to limit the range of characters to move in this world. Also for this reason, I decided that multiple areas are what I need to add to the game after the player movement.

How was this created ? 

Since Unity has a very good tool for making world map which is tilemap so it's pretty easy for making different levels for Exile's Adventure. Brackeys also has very detail video about how it works so check it out here:

With this tool, all i had to do is just find a good tileset and after many research, i found that the "DawnLike - 16x16 Universal Rogue-like tileset v1.81" from DragonDePlatino on OpenGameArt.org fits the game's concept perfectly so i chose this for making all the levels of the game.  Here is the link for it : https://opengameart.org/content/dawnlike-16x16-universal-rogue-like-tileset-v181

A Floor spritesheet from this tileset ( Credit DragonDePlatino on OpenGameArt.org ) 

So, the basic idea of creating levels for Exile's Adventure is to create two different types of zones: a lobby and a battle area. They will be explained in more detail at the below with the image show how they look like in the game.

How does this work ? 

There are multiple types of areas in Exile's Adventure and each has a different layout : 

• The first is lobby area. Player will start the game in an area where there are 4 paths leading to 4 different zones, each has a portal to teleport the character to a different battle area corresponding to 4 directions East, West, South, North. There will be 5 NPCs here, one in the middle of the map and one in each direction to show the character's direction. The image below will show the layout of the lobby without NPCs.

Lobby area 

• The second is battle area. Now, there are 4 battle areas in the game which has same layout representing 4 zones occupied by 4 different types of bosses. More specifically, each area will have only one entrance point at the bottom and player will start there.  There will be 2 guardians of the boss sit at the left and the right of this area and player have to defeat them before coming to the boss at the top.  The image below will show the layout of a battle area without monsters and bosses.

Battle area

Feedback and Improvement 

In the tutorial time of KIT109 of UTAS, i had received a feedback about the level blocking through  some testers, who are my classmates  :

Jasper Lennaen : "First off, loving the pixel art! That left and right walking animation is nice. I'm assuming it is going to be a top down hack and slash? Obvious priority is to get some gameplay in other than walking around, so enemies and whatnot. A sprint button might be nice, get around the lobby area a bit quicker" 

Exile's Adventure is still in development right now and actually it hasn't added any gameplay-related features yet, so I completely agree with Jasper's feedback.  In addition , he also suggested me about dash, which would be a really cool type of movement ,so i will try to add all of them as soon as possible.

Come to improvement part, now the whole world map is pretty simple so I'm thinking to improve that by adding more decoration into the map like tree or even a house for the character. Moreover, I also has a idea for making a town as a starting point of the game ( not a lobby like now ) but I cannot guarantee for this because it would be much more difficult and will cost a lot of time so I will leave it for the last. Monsters, bosses and also NPCs will be added to this game soon so please look forward to it.