Happy New Year everyone!
Here’s the first of many dev blog posts during development of Sentinel 4: Dark Star to hopefully give you an insight into what goes into the production. We’ll give some references back to the previous titles in the Sentinel series to show the ongoing progression.
At the heart of every tower defence game is the map. It’s the root of the strategy for the game, defining where you can build towers and influencing the effectiveness of weaponry and enemy behaviour. Throughout the Sentinel series of games we’ve evolved the map making process to streamline it to allow us to make maps more easily, and add more gameplay features.
We started off designing them by hand on paper and hardcoding them into the game manually – proper ‘old skool’. Here’s one of my original Sentinel 1 map designs:
Once the map was tested and finalised, we’d build and render the landscape to match the design as a single image. Although this worked, it resulted in a lot of large unique textures and meant we were only able to have a small number of maps for Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2.
For Sentinel 3 we switched the map technology to be completely tile based, allowing us to reuse textures and design many maps using tile sets.
Using the excellent Tiled level editor, we designed the maps, setup the majority of the level data and integrated it all into our engine.
The map is built up from many layers from the tile sets, then pre-rendered to a texture during the level load to reduce the memory footprint and keep the framerate up whilst the game is being played.
Here’s a finished Sentinel 3 map in the editor:
In terms of design, the maps have been pretty consistent throughout the series. Most of them consist of many long thin paths and our trademark feature of having barriers to defend along the way have been key to the unique experience of the Sentinel games.
For Sentinel 4: Dark Star we’ve got a lot of new exciting features planned. One thing people are always asking for is open areas, bigger maps and more versatile paths.
Here’s a new map which features a wide open area:
As you can see it features a couple of outcrops which the enemies have to navigate around, and on which you can build turrets. It makes a welcome change to the enemies funnelling along a thin path, and creates new gameplay strategies.
Up until now, all Sentinel maps have been the same size, designed to fit nicely onto an iPhone or iPad screen. However, now that we have expanded to new platforms such as Android and PC, and also now that the iPhone 5 features a wider screen, we’ve decided to have a huge map size variation for Sentinel 4: Dark Star.
Having bigger maps obviously allows for more epic battles, and also for more creative freedom.
For example, one map features climbing up the side of a mountain so it’s tall and thin. Others represent an unprecedented struggle for survival having many barriers from one end of the map to the other.
We’ve got loads of other ideas too for the new maps, such as having destroyable path sections, sneaky shortcuts, special spawn places for bosses to emerge and many more.
The list of new stuff that is coming in Sentinel 4: Dark Star is enormous, so I look forward to writing the next blog which will focus on another new area of the game’s development.
cheers,
Paul
