Hi all! Back again with another blog as I made a new milestone in the game progress – I’ve completed the map out of the levels of the game and am now working on actually designing the rooms and levels. Wanted to take some time to go over that with you! Going to do a brief mention on the Steam AI ban as well as mostly just to put a final word on the topic (as I know I’ve been writing about it a lot).
Steam (Maybe?) Bans AI
So I’ve written a lot on this blog so far about my past playing around the image generator AI to make collages for characters and potential background art. To catch everyone up: I played around with it a bit last year and made three boss fights, however have since had a change of heart out of the data privacy concerns that came up with the training data sets. I’ve since gone through and removed all the previously created AI assets (three boss fights specifically) and replaced them with non-AI art. There is no AI art in the game now and I have no current plans to put any in.
So outside of all of that, there has been a recent development on the topic where Steam is rumored to be full on banning any games that use AI created assets in them (Yikes!). While I had already stopped using AI art in the game, I do still think it is a neat technology that you can get interesting things out of – so I was still open minded about potential future use it if the training dataset issues could ever be resolved. But if Steam is doing a full on ban of games being able to be on the platform, then that’s a full stop right there for AI art ever being in the game all together.
While it’s currently mostly just an unconfirmed rumor from what I’ve read so far – the risk is just flat out too great to ever try and touch it if the publishing platforms start banning things (particularly after the 3.5 years of work I’ve already put into the game!).
So no AI art will be used in the game and this will likely be the last time I write about AI usage on the blog – unless something significant changes in the situation or more clear direction is given. As I’ve said before, if the situation does change I’ll make sure to be transparent and openly write about it here – however at this point it’s just become too much trouble then it’s worth to try and figure out a way to use it so I don’t see myself going down that path for this game anymore. I’m still going to leave the past earlier blogs I wrote about using it up, but I added a disclaimer to the top of them. I think it’s good for people to see what the process and thinking I went through was while the game was being made.
It does make me sad the industry wasn’t able to find someway to coexist with AI tools as I do think there’s a lot of potential in them if they could get it right – both in what they can help to produce and also just the shear time saving potential they could offer. Thems the brakes though. Ultimately the loss of AI tools won’t really effect my game at all fortunately.
Game Maps!
So last we left off I had finished writing the main script of the game and had started the mapping process. As with all things I have done with this game so far – I thought this would be the easy part. It was not the easy part. My map lay out initially was pretty simple – just boxes with lines connecting which rooms in a certain level connect to other rooms. However this ended up not being enough guidance or direction for what I wanted.
So the approach I started doing with each box was to write out what I wanted the focus of the one room to be. AKA – a high level of what the player is going to be doing in that room. Thinking about the nature of the gameplay I’ve created so far, I broke this down into three potential categories: Fighting, Platforming and Platforming Fighting. A Fight room is one I’m designating as a room where the primary activity the player will do is fight enemies. A Platform room is one where the primary activity is jumping and moving in between platforms. A Platform Fight room is one where the player will be platforming while being simultaneously attacked by enemies.
Having these three higher level designations for room activities actually really helped a lot in the map layout process. As I could look at the level when the map was done and see what areas where things were being too repetitive in terms of main activity. If all of these rooms in this one part are all Platform rooms, then I’d throw a Fight room somewhere in there to break up the action, etc.
So away I went drawing all my little boxes and activities. I was very happy at this point to have had the main script in place as it really did help guide how big certain areas should be and what specific activities should be happening leading up to certain points. Once all my boxes were drawn I was left with around 500 rooms.
500 rooms! That’s a lot of backgrounds I’d have to make! Assuming I could make a background a day (without ever taking a day off) that would be like a year and a half of work just on that! Way too much, particularly for a game that’s already going on 4 years into development (and I haven’t even started constructing the levels yet). So in order to cut the workload down to a bit more reasonable level I started combining the rooms together. The boxes and activities stayed the same to what I had drawn out and planned, but now it’s just going to be that there will be multiple activities that happen throughout the rooms. So for example now a room might have two subsections inside of it that are for platforming and one subsection for fighting. This still allowed the basic flow I had plotted out to exist, but without the need to create so many background artwork.
In the end I now currently sit at about 200 rooms – a lot less than 500. That’s still going to be a lot of work and be a HUGE amount of time in the development process of the game, but certainly more reasonable than a 500 room game…. especially for a one man development team. I reserve the right to knock this number down even farther once I actually get into the construction part of the levels.
Drawing Rooms
So now that the map has been drawn out I move onto the actual sketching of the rooms. Currently I’m still using the ole pencil and paper method for doing this. I’m sure there are much more sophisticated methods for coming out with level designs – but I’m actually really enjoying this. There’s something about the tactical nature of just sitting in my recliner and endlessly drawing squiggle lines and stick figures I really enjoy. It’s kind of relaxing.
While I’ve done a fair bit of drawing out basic level designs for Dungeons and Dragons games I’ve DM’d in the past, this process has been a very new experience. You really have to think about every nook and cranny in the room and constantly be asking yourself “why would the player go to this part of the room and if they do go here is there anything for them to do or get”.
This has lead me to coming up with a few new design decisions for the game – one big one is that I’m going to be putting treasure chests with a currently-in-thought treasure in them that helps player in the game. Just having something as simple as this available really helps with coming up with the level design flow as I know have things I can hide throughout the level or motivate the player with. My current thought is that I’m going to tie the goody in the treasure chest to the player’s extra items/abilities they get through the game. So once you get the ability, you have to unlock it to use it and the thing you have to unlock it with are the goodies you find in the treasure chests. That’s at least the thought for now.
Having the maps drawn out with the activities listed in each section was also definitely a good choice. I don’t really have to guess too much what I’m doing in each section of the rooms as I’m drawing them out as to what the flow is supposed to be which really helps.
Currently I’ve made good progress on the level draw outs, but still have a long way to go. I think I’m on room number 40 so far? So I’m predicting it’ll likely take me through the rest of the summer until I’m finished with all 200 rooms. Which means this fall will be action time to start actually getting in there and building out the levels for real.
Exciting times!
That’s it for now, talk to you all next time!
As always you can see progress shots via the social links in the footer.
Thanks!
-Charles