Hello! I've got some level design tech to share today.

Past logs detail the tile system I built for Krog. This was largely similar to the technique I used in Fossil Hunters back on 2017, but re-written from scratch and optimized in a few ways. The system works pretty well, and I'm able to build levels nice and quickly, but they were lacking a certain character that the original had. The walls in the original had some very organic wibbly-wobbly shapes to them that I've been missing more and more as I continued to develop things. There's also been the issue of size variation. When using a tile map approach, you invite a minimum size to details. All this has led me to experimenting with other techniques, not necessarily to replace the tile based approach, but to be used in combination with it.

These past few weeks I've been experimenting with using good ol' fashioned Terrain to create Krog maps. The interior ones, not just the outdoor nature stuff. I ended up building a triplanar shader that automatically textures walls, leaving the planar/flat areas paintable like regular terrain, and my gosh, it's working great!

Look at the wall texture just showing up where it's needed as I paint, great isn't it?

This also solves one of the major tile-based limitations; multiple elevations.

I feel a lot more confident building maps to a finished state now, starting with this near-complete scene from the beginning sequence,

See ya next time!