Level Design Workflow

Ideas for game

My idea for a game came from a typical side scrolling shooter, instead of using spaceships and such I

decided to use a hover tank, which still sticks with a futuristic element. My main inspiration is from

all of the classic snes games like UN Squadron, but instead of incorporating fighter jets and

spaceships I will use a futuristic tank. My thought process in this decision was that planes and

spaceships have already been done a lot, but I haven’t really seen many side scrolling tank games, so

I will be bringing something fresh to the table.

Here you can see my main inspiration:

At first I was thinking about how I could make a jet fighter game, but then looked at the tank and

decided that it would be a better decision to make a tank game, because as I stated before, I have

never seen it done before.

I also thought about using mechs, but ultimately decided not to as it would be rather difficult for me

to move the legs this early in creating games, and a mech without moving parts wouldn’t look very

good in comparison to a tank which only really uses tracks as a moving part, and even then I had a

way to get rid of the tracks by making a hover tank.

Visualisation and more ideas

So with my main idea being a tank, I needed inspiration, I didn’t want it to be your typical tank so I

decided to do a hover tank, it would look pretty similar to a standard tank, but with futuristic camo

and uses a hover system.

A drew inspiration from this image:

So I started making variations of my tanks which came in many forms, at f irst my designs were pretty

simple:

I decided to use a blue camo for that futuristic urban look, but at this time, the tank looked too

boring and symmetrical so I decided to change some things, and make it more rounded, so from

there my tank evolved into a more rounded shape as you can see here:

I still didn’t think this was good enough, I wanted it to look futuristic with a bigger cannon and to

also look more rounded, so I decided to put even more work into the sprite and came up with my

final version:

At this point I think my tank looked great, it’s what I wanted, and it looked well rounded and had

that “futuristic” feel. So all I really did was took the inspiration, removed the tracks and added my

own camo and a bigger cannon.

Next came my idea for an environment, I wanted to do a city area, so tall buildings and such, I ended

up taking inspiration from this image:

This gave me the idea to make my tank fly above a city scape. The buildings would move, with the

foremost buildings moving faster to give the illusion the tank was moving though the city, I also

added a moon with a slower speed as it is far away from the planet as you can see here:

I had to make 3 individual layers for this effect to take place with the moon being the last layer with

the slowest speed.

Planning an execution

The main goal of the game is to kill your enemies but to do this we need movement, and to do this

we need coding, I made a simple code for my tank to move up, down, left and right using the WASD

keys and used enter to shoot, here is my code:

After I coded the tank I needed to add some sort of effect, I decided to use a “smoke trail” although

it was made to look like more of a hovering entity, I also had to code this smoke to my tank to make

it look as though the tank was hovering as seen here:

Once all this code was added I was able to move my tank, and it also used the smoke trail.

After this I had to add some sort of weapon mechanic, so I made a shell sprite/object which the tank

would fire:

After this was made I then had to code the tank to fire the shell, at this point hit detection is not

present, and when firing the shell a sound would be emitted, this too had to be coded in:

We then had to make sure that if the shell missed its target it would exit the room so that it would

not make the game lag if it stayed there:

Next I had to add enemies to my room, first I created a new sprite, I used a premade enemy sprite

which uses an animation:

Next I had to make these enemies spawn outside of the room, and use an attack formation, for this I

had to make 2 new objects, these are called Enemy_1 and system, the system uses code where the

enemy will spawn, and the enemy uses code in the area which it will spawn and at what rate:

Now that this code is set, a set of 3 enemies in a formation will spawn continuously outside of the

map and will enter the space on my screen:

After this I had to make sure I could kill the enemy, this involved making more code for my

projectile, when the projectile is fired it can hit the enemy and will be destroyed on impact, but can

also leave the room safely:

Next I had to give the enemy a projectile which could kill me, this involved making an enemy lazer

sprite:

I then had to make this into an object and code it so that the enemy could use it:

I also gave the projectile some audio, so when it fires it will make some sound:

Now when my player sprite can be hit by projectiles:

Next I made some cosmetic changes to my projectile:

Next I had to add in a shield indicator, this meant I had to make a simple code where there would be

a rectangle in the corner representing a shield bar:

This is the code which is added onto the system object in which there will be a shield indicator, as

you can see the shield health is set to 100.

Here you can see where the shield will be located and the colours of the shield, the shield in my case

is red.

And you can see there is now a shield indicator in the top left.

The next step was making sure that when I get hit, I get destroyed, for that I needed a new explosion

object and sprite that would be used when I die:

Next I had to code these so that when I lost all my shields I would explode and the instance would

reset:

After this my game is complete, but I felt as though I could improve the backgrounds so I started to

make batter backgrounds using photoshop, I went with my original idea but with better visuals, a

city backdrop with the stars and moon in the background.

Here is the background I decided to make:

I then added a city backdrop and edited it appropriately:

I then needed to add a front city backdrop to make it look as though I was moving through a city in

game maker; I used the same backdrop but moved some of the buildings:

At this point I was happy with my backdrop; here is the complete backdrop and game:

At this point I decided I wanted to change things up, I instead wanted to use a fighter jet as my

player sprite, I would keep the base game as it is but change the player sprite, simple enough, so I

decided to go with a standard jet design:

Along with this I needed a new “smoke sprite” I decided to change it to a jet stream:

I decided to make a new explosion to go along with this:

Here is the game with the final changes in place:

And the death explosion:

In addition to all of this I decided to make a new missile:

I then added a small title screen, with a button you can click to start the game, for this I made some

new sprits and used them as objects, then placed them in a new room which would be used for my

title screen, I then added an easy to use event where if you click the start game button the game will

start:

Below is the simple left click event to go to next room event:

I then made a quick edit to my background again and added some lights to the buildings:

After all these steps my game is complete, a simple side scrolling shooter. It’s nothing special and

was easy to make but it’s still enjoyable, and this will help me with further ideas in the future.