Designing the Level

From this chapter on to the end of this book, you’ll be actively working on creating a point-and-click adventure game. We’ll show you the necessary steps to create a game in which you’ll place and command a character whose name is Clara. Players will be controlling her actions inside a cave that will be initially dark, but you’ll be able to give controls to the player to change the conditions of the lights. Once you figure out how to move her around in the world, you’ll also place trigger points in this cave so that the world reacts to Clara’s actions to make things interesting but also challenging. This part of this book will cover enough basic building blocks for you to start practicing building small-scale adventure games.

Through all these efforts, you’ll learn how to utilize different parts of Godot Engine, especially the ones that are pertinent to 3D workflow. Whenever it’s necessary, we’ll...

Technical requirements

Starting with this chapter, and continuing in the remaining chapters, you’ll be creating a point-and-click adventure game. Since it’d be too time-consuming for you to prepare all the game assets, we are providing them. We have already exported the glTF files from Blender. Should you need to access the originals for any modifications, or when a specific file is mentioned, these files can be found in the Blender Models.zip file in this book’s GitHub repository.

Unlike the previous chapters, which usually had Start and Finish folders with simple assets, we’ll switch things up a bit. This chapter will have the usual folders too, but they will contain the content of a Godot project. The Godot project in the Start folder will contain the barebone assets for you to start building the level for the game. By the end of this chapter, your game will have reached a stage where you can use the content from the Finish folder to compare what you...

Creating the cave

For the first level in Clara’s adventures, we thought of a small place so that you don’t get overwhelmed with building a large layout. Figure 9.1 should help you visualize what we are building. This is a Blender render we’ll try to recreate in Godot:

Figure 9.1 – We’ll be building this small level for Clara to discover

Our world will consist of a dock inside a cave that has access to the sea. When Clara anchors her boat, she sees inside the cave. There isn’t much light to begin with, but as little as she can see, the dock leads to a pier with laid stone. She can also see that there are a bunch of boxes, barrels, and pots distributed here and there. Though the sconces on the walls will start unlit when the game runs, as shown in Figure 9.1, you can see that all the sconces on the walls are lit. This is because we want to show you a later stage in the game so that you can see what we are aiming for....

Constructing the missing materials

When we were placing the props, we covered the gap near the door by placing a bush prop (this can be seen in Figure 9.10). However, there is something awkward about those bushes. Similarly, the arch over the door has some weird-looking dangling things over the stone bricks. They should be showing greenery and leaves but all we have is a bland, gray surface. We’ll fix these issues in this section.

In addition, while it made sense to export individual models from Blender and place them in a Godot scene, it didn’t make sense to export the water body. Even in Blender, that object was a plane that has been applied a shader that mimicked water. We’ll recreate that effect in Godot.

Fixing the leaves

First, let’s describe what the problem is with the gray leaves. All the other models seem to have their materials displayed properly. Despite all intentions and efforts, certain things are never fully transferred between applications...

Laying models on a grid

The main difference between placing objects such as candles, pots, and barrels, short props, and floor and wall pieces is that you can distribute the former objects willy-nilly. They don’t have to follow a pattern, whereas the floor and wall pieces must snap to each other. This kind of structure is also referred to as a grid.

To speed things up, we even chose to duplicate an existing piece instead of instancing a fresh one because when you create a new instance, it’d start at the scene origin, and you’d have to move this new piece near your current area. You can even select multiple tiles in a row, duplicate them, and snap these next to the old batch. Despite all these shortcuts, since all this sounds formulaic, perhaps there should be a better tool. GridMap to the rescue!

If you have used Godot for 2D, you may already be familiar with the TileMap node. GridMap is the same except it works in 3D. Thus, whereas TileMap will let you...

Taking advantage of MeshLibrary

When you clicked FloorGridMap to investigate its properties, the Godot interface changed slightly, and it informed you that you should assign a MeshLibrary since, without one, a GridMap is ineffective. In this section, we’ll show you what goes into creating a MeshLibrary. We’ll also talk about possible challenges you might face, not technically, but workflow-wise.

There are two ways to create a MeshLibrary. We’ll show you the most common way since the other method involves keeping meshes separately in the filesystem, and our project has not been set up to accommodate that scenario. Without further ado, this is how you create a mesh library:

1. Start a new scene and save it as Floor-MeshLibrary.tscn in Miscellaneous.
2. Choose a Spatial node as its root.
3. Instance Floor_Standard under the Spatial node in the Scene panel.
4. Click the Scene button in Godot’s top menu.
5. Expand Convert To and choose MeshLibrary...

Summary

This chapter was the first out of many chapters that will help you build a game. To kick things off, we tackled the level design aspect of the game.

This effort involved placing many elements that make up the environment Clara will experience. For structures that are next to each other, you learned how to take advantage of the snapping feature, but you can also decorate your scene carefree if you wish, in the case of distributing props. In the end, you had a clean scene structure with objects grouped under the relevant nodes in the Scene tree.

Along the way, you noticed that some of the materials were either misconfigured or simply missing. To fix these issues, you had to dive deeper into the Inspector settings for materials with which you remedied the transparency issue. Furthermore, you wrote a shader in Godot to simulate a body of water.

Considering what you have learned so far and the likelihood that you might be designing more levels that have grid patterns...

Further reading

Level design doesn’t always involve placing physical elements inside the game world. Sometimes, it means enticing sound design, hiding cute or interesting lore elements pertinent to the world and story, and adding non-player characters your players can relate to or simply hate. There is a whole layer of psychological factors to designing good levels so that you can evoke the emotions you desire in your players. If you want to elevate your knowledge in this domain, you are going to have to examine resources that are not necessarily game engine-specific. So, broaden your horizons! Here are a few resources that will get you started:

• https://www.worldofleveldesign.com
• https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/fundamentals-professional-level-design
• https://www.cgmasteracademy.com/courses/46-level-design-for-games/
• https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-level-design-2

You had to write a water shader in this chapter. Working with shaders is...