A New Face

This week we introduced a new face to the team, Rotorz. No, that's not a really strange name, it's a level design tool that we decided to invest in. While our tools team had a really cool level design tool that they had been working on it was having some growing pains and we needed to get going. We found Rotorz and thought it looked great so we took the plunge. I could not be happier. Rotorz is incredibly easy to use and has streamlined my workflow like nothing ever could. I put the old tileset into it so I could begin playing with it and creating levels. Once Ian had given me the new tileset I put it in and created three levels for the critique.

The result of the critique was overall good. People had fun with what was in the levels but felt like there wasn't that much there. Which there wasn't, enemies aren't in yet so a bug chunk of what the levels will be wasn't present. The more pressing feedback from the critique was that the levels felt small and too fast paced. Thankfully these two issues are easily solved in the same way. The issue with the pacing is that there are no rest areas, it's all action which tires the player out. By adding in rest areas the pacing will be better and the level will get larger. I may still need to increase the size of the ships but it's a solid first step. Finally being able to create some levels easily has given a lot of confidence moving forward. I know that the more I make levels the better they'll get and with Rotorz that process should be much easier.