Natural Looking Levels

Hi, I am currently working on a turn based RPG and I was just stating on the the actual levels and I was wondering how to go about making them actually feel real. All the levels I make feel like, well levels. I was wondering if anyone has any good advice or could point me in the direction of some good videos or articles that I could read. Bing searches for this information have not been kind to me so far.

try google maybe yahoo a couple time oh and safari it also :)

jus kidding. well don’t make levels then… make chapters!! If you know what I mean. Well I cant really describe it, but rpg games shouldnt have levels, they should have worlds or something like that. (hopefully you understand me) :)

Yeah I understand, I am just having so much trouble with it for some reason. Mechanics and story come so easy for me but when I try to map out these levels it just comes out as crap.

aha best of luck man

Thanks, I am going to need it.

autotiling makes levels look organic.

What I would do is lets say, for grass, get a picture of the grass you want and create a pattern on Photoshop. Then use the a brush to draw out what area you want covered in grass and use a pattern overlay. The area you painted will now be all grass. Import as a background and just add terain and collision boundaries.

Gives levels a more natural look rather than them being all blocky. And of course, use layers for other parts you want like paths or anything.

Just try to make it less static, create background and foreground and elements and fill it with stuff whilst creating some depth in the art.

I’ma little late on this topic, I know, and you’ve probably figured out what you need to by now, but I just thought I’d share this: http://blog.semisecretsoftware.com/tuning-canabalt

It’s not directly related to what you’re trying to do, but in that article Adam Atomic explains how he went about making Canabalt and how he made it feel more realistic. Hopefully it at least inspires some sort of insight for you, plus I think it’s a good read for any developer.

Thats was a really good and helpful article, thanks. I love to read stuff like that about game design.

Joost from Ronimo has touched on this (among other things, great resource), when he explained how they made Awesomenauts’ levels non-repetitive.

linky

You could make randomly generated tiles. The more the better, but also the slower the processing because of the Math.Random function, so don’t make too many tiles. You could try using conditionals… for example, ‘Oh, somebody dug here, and there’s some grass nearby, so the grass will look a bit disheveled, so we’ll include a tile for that and replace the tile originally there.’ Or, ‘Somebody got cut by this great big flaming sword, and there is blood and gore all over the pavement. I’ll put in a randomly generated tile for that. We’ll also replace the tile originally there." But if you don’t want that… you could make the grass colour and the outlines of the grass. Place the grass and outlines in front, but the grass color behind the grass outlines. When blood spatters on the grass, update the Display List. Make sure the blood is in front of everything EXCEPT the grass outlines using the setChildIndex(blood, numChildren – 2) method. The grass outlines will show… but the grass will look covered in blood. Although I don’t know how much coding and work that will take.