City of Steam Developer Journals - Design 2012 02 07 news

Design Dev Journal

This month we’re all busily preparing for GDC. For the Level Design team, that means putting together a large section of the world for players to explore. We’d like to give players a preview of several of the locations featured in the game, and we also want to show off the capability of our system to quickly stream and load new environmental tilesets.

Let’s take a look at one of these tilesets, which we call Nexan Archives. These are cellars beneath the city of Ebonwax that have become overrun with monsters. Players can use these areas to practice combat, try out new abilities, and pick up a little money and experience before venturing beyond the streets of Ebonwax Central. We’re working on three Nexan Archives – Beginner, Advanced, and Elite. Each set will span 20 levels and will provide a variety of challenges for players of different skill levels.

A little more on tilesets:

We’re proud to say that in City of Steam, dungeons/levels are created dynamically from tileset placement information and the specific tileset package of the entered dungeon.  The one featured above represents an 800kb download. Yup, that’s right. The two screenshots are almost the same size as the download required to play 60 Training Grounds levels. From a level designer perspective, this dynamic setup allows us to fix problems and update levels nearly on the fly.

We’ll be sure to focus on other tilesets in the future and this should bring to light just how different each one is. These aren’t simply a change in color; each one is unique and specific to a location and setting. If you enter the sewers, you’d expect to be in a, well, sewer environment.

Head to the developer journal page to read more.