Godot 4.4.1
I am a programmer, working with two artists for my game’s arts. we are making a 2D platformer game with hand drawn art style really similar to hollow Knight and castle crushers. we have a problem with making the levels.
we tried using tile sets for making the levels but they use Photoshop with a light pen and it’s really hard to make seamless textures .
another thing we tried was drawing each part of the level individually and me placing them into Godot. the problem with this one is that it’s really hard to design the level like this.
anyone knows how the hollow Knight or Castle Crashers devs made their game textures?
and also my artists don’t know how to make animations so I make animations with bone 2D and rotating them.
Hi,
Photoshop has an option to preview tiling patterns which is in View > Pattern Preview (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/pattern-preview.html). That option allows the users to do this:
Which is very convenient to paint tiling stuff. Simply ensure that everything is tiling properly, then export the actual single tile, and everything should work fine in the engine.
I don’t know how HK or Castle Crashers have been made, but here are a few advices:
- Keep a clean separation between the level design and the level art. A platformer should be playable even without any level art, just with simple rectangular grounds. Then you can add your level art on top of it, but keep in mind that you should not depend on the art to work on the rest of the game. May seem obvious, but having done a platformer game myself, I thought it would be nice to make that point!
- Drawing each part and placing it by hand is indeed very tedious. What I’ve done for my own platformer game is using a tileset for the basic art, and then I added assets manually on top of that to beautify everything and hide some of the tileset flaws/break the repetition. What I mean is that, you don’t have to use either tiles or hand-made levels, you can use both techniques.
- To save you some time, you can re-use some assets and just a bit of randomization. With one single asset, by scaling it a bit, flipping it, slightly changing its tint, you can have a lot of variations that will make your level look good for a very low cost. On the game I’m currently working on, I’ve implemented a randomizer script, which is very simple, but that comes with many options to play around with:
Doesn’t really matter what each option does, what matters is that I can now create only a few scenes for grass, rock, etc. and then rely on that script to do the randomization part for me, instead of doing it by hand. I’m working on a top down procedurally generated game so it’s obviously more relevant that it would be for a platformer, but that’s still something you could use to save you time, maybe.
and also my artists don’t know how to make animations so I make animations with bone 2D and rotating them.
Well, that can work, it all depends on the artstyle you’re looking for. If you’re looking for HK looking animations, then that would not be enough, but if you’re fine with how your animations look, then it’s okay. Photoshop has some tools for animating frame by frame, which, according to some artists I know, is not the best animation system out there, but it works.
In case that helps, here’s a link to a very cool video of HK animations:
