Hello everyone!

We have been working post-jam on Elonkorjuu and have finished a rough version of a universal level editor. By universal I mean it can be used on any project using similar kind of map generation as Elonkorjuu does. As Elonkorjuu levels are nothing more than numbers in a .txt file.

Level Generation

Here you can see one of the levels in our LD build. It's just object IDs in .txt format. Every index is 2x2m inside Unity and they are just prefabs that are placed based on the ID and its location, which we can get from the file. This is why Elonkorjuu doesn't have any verticality nor does support rotating any map objects inside the editor. All of the objects must have different IDs for different rotations, if that is needed. Making levels inside notepad works, but it is a bit tedious and kind of hard to visualise the environment.

Prefab examples

Level Editor

As you can see, editing levels this way is a lot more efficient than just typing numbers in a notepad. It's nothing too fancy, but gets the job done.

The generated level from that looks like this:

Universal Usability

Now, if the level editor needed assets from the game it wouldn't really work universally. That's why there is a way to separate the level editor by making it a standalone build. We can select the sprites for each ID by adding an IDTexture.png file to EditorData folder. Currently the ID texture file must be 1024x1024 and each sprite must be 64x64 pixels. This could be made as an option to change the parameters, but it works for now. The sprites are read from bottom-left to right each row at a time. Here is the currently used ID texture to help understand what I mean.

You can also freely modify the brackets on the right side of level editor by adding the IDs and bracket names inside IDList.txt file.