Level Design Process

Now that the gamestates are done and the scenes are transitioning smoothly, its time to design some levels! This is the process that I am using:

First I start with a maze, for this project I am using a free web based maze generator that produces an ASCII maze.

Now this maze is pretty simple. The solution is marked and its a semi straight path, it also has a lot of area that isn't really used. I'm thinking that i'll leave the straight path up and place a few cats on it, and then alter the unused space to give the player a choice: The straight path with enemies, or the difficult path without extra danger.

So here I've added the player[4] and cheese[6] spawns, some cats[5], and a few doors[3] to make things more interesting. I've also altered the walls a bit.

The level is now done really, the last part is to change everything to the number format that the game engine reads. All easily done with 'Find' and 'Replace'. The game also needs to know how many cells the maze is, what direction the player will come out of the doors, and how many cells are in each row. These are all placed at the top.

Now the hardest part. putting in all the damn commas!

Now I just give it a test run and move on to the next level!

**A good programming practice with high speed languages like this is to only do one thing at a time! If you change something, compile and run! Every time!

#CATMOUSE