Now, we have to be very creative here, as we have to design all the levels. Create them with objectives in mind, such as something like "The opposing team has invaded our fortress just on the other side of the forest, you must walk around the forest avoiding enemy patrols to infiltrate our base and take it back." For these levels, I am going to use 3D Studio Max, to keep with our 3D realism theme; rendering these images is taking a long time but I know they will look fantastic.
This will be our first level, and as you can see it looks great. This was rendered at 1200x1200px with high-resolution textures, 8 omni lights with full textures being rendered.
This image took my HP Pavillion 3.0 GHz AMD Black 6 Core Processor with 12 GB of ram and 1GB video card (so in other words a super powerful computer) over a minute to render, but it looks great! When we import this image into our level we will create bounds around the level so the player cannot walk through the tree line. You can make your levels a lot longer, I just made these ones up quickly. It would be a good idea to make the level beatable within 5-10 minutes, so make it a big level, something double or even triple the size of our image here. Keep in mind that when we import this image into GameSalad it will automatically resize it because it will be "too big" to import, but all we have to do is simply resize it to the full size in the Scene Editor.
This image gives us an idea of how our indoor levels should look, don't forget it looks plain right now, but we are going to populate it with computers, and other mechs within GameSalad. Just some tips to remember when designing our levels:
- Make it look amazing, dramatic lighting, bump textures, realism to the full.
- Fill it up! Put lots of cool-looking scenery, objects, and other things that will add to the visual experience.
- Make lots of memorable moments in the level, things that will make the player say, "Wow, remember what happened when you get to the bridge? You haven't gotten there yet?! I'm not going to tell you what happens because you will be shocked!"
- It doesn't have to be "big", you can make a medium-sized level with lots of things to do in it that will drag out the gameplay time. Try to be original.
- In Mario games, some levels are very short, but there are secrets you can find that make the level take double or triple the time to finish.