Method Inquiry - Platform Level Planning

How do you initially plan levels during platform game development? Are you using a standard/graph paper and pencil, an application/utility, or just winging it in C2?

I usually just wing it and test as I go. Unless of course I have an specific design I'm after, then I do a rough scetch on paper.

I started out by making rough drafts of the levels on a notepad, but in the end I did most of my game directly in C2. Once you've got the basic scenery it's a bit better since you can actually test everything while you work on it.

It depends on how big and complicated you're planning on making your layouts.

With small/simple layouts you can mostly wing it as you go, but if you're planing on big layouts with multi paths and whatnot it'll be faster to sketch it down on paper first, at least the main routes of platforms.

Work with tile based platforms and scenery 32px/64px, then use a math paper as your grid and sketch on it.

You won't have to test everything since you know exactly how high and how wide you can jump.

The tilemap plugin is amazing but it is still not perfect, you can't fill/draw a grid with rotated tiles and you can't select and delete a bunch of tiles and you can't move tiles around, so making changes to your path on the layout can be a little tedious a times.

This tutorial helped me immensely.

Here is what I ended up doing:

• Drew out (on paper) basic path.
• Drew out (on paper) detailed level design (including where power-ups, obstacles would be). Check my dev log. I uploaded pics of my sketches.
• Laid out basic solid shapes to create path. Ran game and tested to make sure jumps, collisions, etc. all worked. Did a test export.
• Added enemies, power-ups, obstacles and ran through level again. Did a test export.
• Added tile art, parallax layers, any other art. Ran through game. Did a test export.

having an IN-Game editor is what helped me the most. I Could make my maps, and test my AI all at the same time.

The only things i had to worry about outside my game editor was flowcharts and getting a decent looking tile-set.