Devlog #2. Levelling up the map design

Another look behind the curtain into how the game is being developed today. During our live-stream today on our lead developers twitch channel level design was the key focus. Designing golf holes for the game is very important as interesting holes make the game fun and challenging.

Putting together levels can be slow but with the tools we use it makes it a little bit quicker and today we will show you how most of those make the process quicker.

Prefabulous

Unity's prefab system is great for making drag and drop items to be used multiple times and allow for instant updating of all the usages of those prefabs throughout the project. This allows for quick small changes to effect everything quickly.

Prefabs allow our team to quickly and effectively piece together levels in a seamless fluid way. This drastically cuts down on level design time. The first level took 3 times longer than the every other level as prefabs had not yet been created yet for the pieces of the golf course. Once these prefabs were created levels could be created in roughly 15 minutes. That's pretty quick!!

Con- Templating other options

On top of this prefab system a template level was created to base each level off of with all the lighting and level settings pre-baked in. This allowed for levels to be initialized quite easily as all the skybox, lighting and post processing was already ready to go in each scene. Each level is created by experimenting with small chunks or ideas of gameplay which are then extended to see their viability. one of these ideas that was tested was a balance beam.

Using this balance beam on its own created a nice easy hole for the earlier stages of the game. but it was found that it can be used later on in more challenging and complex ways. Ie. chaining the beams together offset, or using the beam as a ramp.

Sneak peak at hole 15 Shhhh...

Hole 15 is a pick a path style hole, risk the perilous balance beam or take the safer narrow path to reach the hole, Which one will you choose??

TLDR;

Overall, using both Prefabs and template levels allows for quick and easy level creation to quickly scale up the amount of levels within the game. Using this the amount of holes in the game has jumped rather rapidly and we are so excited for release!!

Coming 17th October!!!