Why programming levels is a bad idea

adrwen on 2010/04/03 20:22 of Door Handle Team
— edited on 2010/04/03 20:22

Simply put, it takes forever. Today, I have produced 2 levels and one cutscene so far in about 10 hours, all of the levels were of the size 640,480 and don't take more than a minute to finish if you know how.

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Comments

StephenJacob on 2010/04/03 21:36:

Yeah , very true .
I thought I would have time to work a bit more on the gameplay today but making levels is sooooo long .
It took me the whole day to do 3 working levels .

I think it would take less time to build a level generator than to produce a single well thought level .

Good luck with the end of your game .

2 hours left ...

adrwen on 2010/04/03 21:44:

Well I'm just gonna throw in some music (maybe), finish one simple level and one cutscene and then it'll have to do. Good luck to you too.

Srekel on 2010/04/04 10:48:

It depends a lot on the game. In some cases it can be a very quick way to do it. If you don't you'll have to write a level editor and save/load code including loading custom logic etc.

That said, I did write a level editor for Bouncy 2 and it was totally worth it. :)

gcewing on 2010/04/04 21:20:

In all of my levelful games, I've found the time invested in writing a level editor to be well repaid. It doesn't actually take as much time as you might think if you approach it the right way. The way I do it  is to build the level editor into the game, so that it shares all of the level display code. You have to write all of that anyway, and it usually doesn't take a huge amount more to make it editable. And if you take advantage of pickle, loading and saving can be very easy.

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It also helps if you have libraries such as Albow and Humerus that provide all the surrounding menu code, etc. Albow has recently become OpenGL-capable, so you have even less excuse for not using it now. :-)
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