(Translated automatically from Korean.)
Hello everyone!
Today, we'd like to introduce our team's internal tile-based level design tool we use for our game development.
Our game features a top-down perspective with varied heights and 3D terrain.
These landscapes are made up of tiles, and each tile helps generate the terrain based on data like height, corner shape, and type.
Early Development
In the early stages of development, we had to manually input this information for every single tile.
The workflow back then was...
1. Place tile pieces to create the 'visible part'.
2. Enter the tile type (floor or wall) and height for the wall and ground parts of the tiles.
3. Enter wall or cliff information at the edges of the floor area, matching the tile shape and direction.
Early in development, the terrain was relatively simple and the data required to build it didn't change very often, so this approach worked well enough for a time.
However, as the game's core structure solidified and we began full-scale level design, we realized we desperately needed to automate this workflow.
With the terrain growing increasingly complex, the difficulty of manual placement skyrocketed, making level iterations incredibly tedious.
New Method
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With the new method, the user only needs to input the height values, and the corresponding meta-information and tiles are generated automatically.
Simply dragging a rectangular selection with the tile brush automatically creates the terrain shown above.
To achieve this automation, we created pre-standardized terrain sets.
The editor for setting up these terrain sets looks like the above.
Tool in Action
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This is a GIF recorded in the early stages of developing the terrain tool.
It's quite unpolished in several areas, and you can even see some stuttering when dragging the terrain.
We have gradually improved the inconvenient parts through actual usage, and now it is much cleaner and faster.
For indoor environments, setting the boundaries as Wall will automatically generate the borders.
Outside of the wall, a ceiling (the black area) is automatically generated.
Below are GIFs showing simple indoor and outdoor terrain being edited using the tool.
Thank you for reading!
