2D Level Design

Development World Creation
1

Evening all.

I’ve been toying around with the idea of making a 2D side scrolling platformer and I’m just trying to figure out a good way to work with assets to create the levels.

I want to avoid using tilemaps to make the maps as its not the style of level I want to go for. Basically Mario or Terraria style, blocks snapped into place that are always on a grid.

Want I would like to do is create more fluid levels. Think “Dust: An Elysian Tail”

The problem that I have is that if the sprites im using are occupying the same plane within the world, you get Z fighting. I know I can move sprites closer and further away from the camera to prevent this, but with a perspective camera, you will see them moving independently.

The reason for the perspective camera is so I can have objects further away from the camera move slower as the player moves around the screen. Pretty standard stuff. But im just a bit unsure about how to do the plane in which the player and enemies exist on.

Can sprites have a collision thickness so that the character wont fall through the world.

I’ve been looking around for the past two days on some clue as to how to go about doing this, but all the info I can find just wants me to use tile maps. Which looks great n all. But not for this type of level design.

Any suggestions are very welcome. Cheers all!

2

Hello there!

We’re actually in the midst of doing a pixel art 2d/3d game that has a level design set up similar to what youre thinking.

Our environments are 3d, but what we ended up doing is having to make cubic cells, so as to snap levels together for design.

Essentially, its very similar to tile maps but with the extra dimension we could do some really cool stuff in the backgrond (or foreground).

We too use a perspective camera, but with sprites and the desired resolution, we have to make sure the camera aspect is on the mark, so things look good and not distorted.

The player and enemies all exist on the same plane (unless there are gameplay reasons for them to not be, IE. boss, etc).

For sprite collision, we used collision volumes for ease of use and created a number of collision channels to make sure they interact appropriately. But yes, you can increase the collision volume to do as you desire.