Best practise for designing floor pieces in mobile 2.5D platformer games?

jjohal49

Hi All,

I'm a newbie to game development, i'll try to explain the best i can.

I wanted to know what are the best practises for building floor pieces in mobile 2.5D platformer games. I've used Mario for an example (see image) as this is the style i will be mimicking as a practice run. The bottom section of the floor looks like it could be standard cubes with a world space texture applied so wherever you move the shape the texture will be consistent. The grass section is what i'm uncertain on. In the past i've made a corner piece and a flat section, such as Pic 1. Ive also tried just making the side sections and placed them to the cubes such as in Pic 2 and used a tri planar shader to add images to the sides and the top. I can see both pros and cons to either.

My 2 question are:

What is the best mesh shape for the grass section to mimic the Mario floor?

Should i texture the grass area by UVs or another projection shader?

Any views on this will be a great help.

Thanks

poopipe

I'm pretty confident they will have a system that generates the geometry (semi) procedurally.  Most likely it will place meshes at the outer edges of the platform and fill the middle with player facing planes.

As you suggest, uvs are almost certainly in world space for the platform pieces - which works fine since they're all on a grid.

jjohal49

That does makes sense. If i take the approach of my bottom pic, it will certainly work, however, I wonder if there is a better way of designing these pieces. 

RN

Reminds me of "modular level design", there are a few links in the Polycount wiki with some theory:

- https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Two/WorkflowAndModularity.html

- https://polycount.com/discussion/116526/hirstarts-and-what-he-can-teach-environment-artists-about-modularity/

(There's more in the wiki page) 

There's also some cool mobile game modular art from Henk Nieborg, for inspiration:

RN

As for how I would do it, I think I would block out the level with plain boxes, worrying about making the level fun to play and have a good pace -- this means that you already have a game engine with actors and props that you can play with.
Only after this 'blueprint' is done would I worry about creating the level assets. The same greyboxing of a level can be made into different settings, like a dungeon in a castle, a forest, a canyon etc. That's why the aesthetics can be done later.

jjohal49

Thanks for those links, thats brill!