Best way to handle long levels

[drewMar]

Hello,

As the title says, I,am trying to figure out the best way to create long levels. I am making a space shooter similar to Life Force or the original Gradius, where you fly through obstacles etc while shooting stuff, and boss fights at the end of each level. The shooter examples I've seen are your basic never ending scrolling type games but that's not what I want to do. So my question is, do I just string a bunch of scenes out to make one "level? Or is there another way to get it done? Thanks.

[Shawn]

You could create your background obstacles off screen and have them move towards the player to simulate moving through the level. Of course that requires all the background to be made out of active objects and you'd have to time it just right so it appears seamless. Then have enemies show up at the appropriate intervals to match the level layout. Just make sure you destroy the objects after they are off the screen.

If you just used one long frame to do it there would be all sorts of issues to do it the way Gradius, R-Type, etc worked. Scrolling would have to be independent of your ship (you could use an invisible active perpetually moving right with scrolling centered on it), but you'd also have to make sure your ship moves forward at the same scrolling speed while standing still as well as making sure the player can't leave the left or right side of the screen while scrolling. For the boss, you'd have to make sure the background layer has perpetual scrolling if you want to make it look like you're still moving forward while fighting the boss. The boss would be at the end of the level so that would basically be one screen width for the fight. There's no way to know how long the boss fight will take the player so you can't just make the level really long at the end where the boss is.

I'd do the first method and that would be the closest to how the game actually worked. It might not be efficient using active objects for the background obstacles but that would be far easier to do. Now of course you don't create the entire level off screen at once, just enough to keep the scrolling looking correct. It would take a while to build a level doing this though, you'd have a lot of create object events. Would probably be better off making a level editor and have it read values from an array to determine what objects to place instead of building the entire thing manually one by one.

[drewMar]

Thanks for the reply. It sounds super complicated, which I would suspect is why I haven't been able to find an example anywhere. Do you think I'm biting off more than I can chew? Should I start with something more like a platformer, etc? I honestly thought a shooter would be pretty basic. I've used some programs like construct2 and with that you could set up the whole level without any issues. I purchased fusion 2.5 awhile back and I'm determined to learn it.

[Shawn]

I could be over thinking it and making it more complicated than it needs to be. Laying out the entire level in the frame editor works, you just have to solve the scrolling. It's actually not that bad, the main thing would be if you want background scrolling while fighting the boss. That would be trickier to solve because your level would be premade then at the end you'd have to switch to endless scrolling.

[drewMar]

My phone deleted my last response. Actually, I would want the scrolling to stop at the end, so that should hopefully make things easier. In order to set up a long level, do I need to set the resolution width larger, or something else?

[Popcorn]

I checked out Life Force and Gradius. Both of these games could get a bit tricky to get 100% similar. The thing is, do you need the smooth level transition of Gradius and / or the destructable terrain of Life Force?

Gradius would be the simplest. If you could interupt the game between each level, for instance with a gamestat screen, I see no reason why you cannot do levels similar to Gradius in Fusion. Each level should be in it's own frame. Just make the frame as wide as you want each level to be, and setup the entire level in the frame editor. Make sure enemies don't move until the player is close. And use Fusion's built-in scrolling in the eventeditor.
There are also some ways to get the smooth leveltransition. If you want to have the background scroll while switching level (after a boss kill), you may jump to next frame when a level is done and make sure the background is displayed at the exact same position in the next frame. Another method would be to fade the background layer to complete blackness after the bosskill, then jump to the next frame and fade the background back in. This would be the easiest. You would still need to position the ship in the next frame, though, so it doesn't appear to have skipped frame. In the first level, simply subtract the position of the left visible edge of the frame from the ship's position, store that value in a global value and use this to position the ship in the next frame.

Another option and the one I would go for if I was making Life Force with destructible terrain, is to make a level / zone editor, and load only parts of the level while playing. This is something I've allready done in a game (see video), and it works fluently. It lets you have as big levels as you want with as many active objects as you want. The terrain and enemies are created just before entering the screen, and destroyed when you cannot see them anymore. However, this approach isn't something I would recommend for a beginner.

You should also consider which system you're developing for. Most windows pc's wouldn't struggle with quite large prebuilt levels and lots of objects, while the iOS and Android runtime would lag alot.
Also keep in mind that if you're using Fusion's built-in scrolling, the widest a frame can be is 32.000 pixels. That's not very large for a space scroller. The smaller the resolution, the longer levels you can have.







My android game that's using that last approach, but in this game each level are interupted by a stats screen:

[drewMar]

I am hoping to design the game for pc/android/ios. Chopterfury, by the way, looks awesome. I would be fine with some interruption in between levels, I'm not doing a remake, but in terms of the basic style of space, shooting, flying through a level, boss at the end. Since this is my first game I don't want severe complication so building a level editor is probably out of the question, although destructible terrain would be nice, I hadn't actually thought about whether or not I'd want that. If it would make things extremely difficult I will probably go with no.

In terms of resolution, it sounds like there would be issues if I were to build the game in 1080p? I'm not doing pixel art, will most likely make most of it in a vector program and perhaps some of it in gimp. If there are ways to keep the game looking good on bigger screens without 1080p that would be okay.

Are there any examples of a level editor working in the fashion you mentioned? I would love to see how that works.

[Popcorn]

Salamanderpants: 32.000 pixels, same as width.

DrewMar: leveleditors can actually be very simple, i can show you an example next week (away atm). Send pm if i forget.

[Volnaiskra]

Drewmar, we're you trying to edit your response? That's happened a few times to me : instead of editing it deletes it. I've learned to never edit on a phone (I make a new reply if necessary)

[Popcorn]

Salamanderpants: I was wrong. It seems like the limit of 32.000 pixels are no more. Don't know when that happened, but I just tested, and max frame area length shouldn't be an obstacle anymore. You can make it as big as you want.