Majority of my time spent on this internship is map design. You may be asking yourself, what is map design? Well it all depends on that type of game your designing. We are working on a side-scrolling game in which the action is viewed from a side-view camera angle. So on a image plane, a character will move either left or right.
So if I only have to focus on whats left and right of me, I only need to worry about the X and Y axis. Unlike 3D i would have X,Y and Z axis. So a common use for a side scrolling game is called mostly called a platform game. Platform games feature jump, running, swimming, think Super Mario.
Now that we know what a side scrolling game or a platform game works we have to also know how the map works. In side scrolling games we have layers in which are divided. We have the background, foreground, parallax, and over layer. Like photoshop each layer can have a layer of its own.
But before I go this far, lets start with the foreground. As you can see from the image above my Stick figure “Bob” is standing on a line. This line represents my foreground. On this layer Bob can make contact with this line because there is collision. Collision is when two or more objects detect each other. So Bob is an object and so is the line. If there was no collision, Bob will fall through and fall to his death.
The background, as you can see from the image below, the background has no collision with Bob because the trees are located right behind him.
The parallax is located right behind the background. What interesting about the parallax is you can make it scroll. So if you have a game were you want to give the illusion as if you have moving water in the parallax, you can assign a scroll value so the image in which you put on the parallax layers scrolls from left to right or vice versa.
Last but not least the over layer. The over layer is mostly reserved for or the menus of the game. For Bob I’m going to give him a Health bar, hes at 100% so hes very healthy!
