The Release Countdown

The game will be released on the 6th of June, accompanied by a trailer. Until then, I’ll post a short behind-the-scenes devlog entry each day, going into details about the level design, racing ships, and more.

Behind the Scenes of Level Design

Dealing with 1-bit graphics and square tiles is very tricky to decorate levels so that the actual collisions stay very obvious. But also not everything should be a collider (alone for performance reasons). I decided to have two tilemaps for each race track theme: one that displays the collision and one that is purely decoration.

The collision-based tiles are less transparent and bring a more solid appearance.

Also, for the example of the Asteroid theme, both sets overlap nicely, which allows a wild combination of those sets that make the levels feel more organic. On the level design side, it’s important not to use the decorative tiles in places where the player might expect a collider.

Using LDtk as a level editor in combination with the LDtk importer plugin for Playdate made iterations fast and easy. During this project, I separated the level design process into two steps: starting off with the collision-only versions and then asking players to test them. Only after this validation did I basically just decorate the functionality-proven levels.

It was a balancing act to not add too much decoration (aka sprites) to the scenes without falling below the minimum of 40 FPS, so every level needed to be verified after the decoration again.

The Corporate Cosmic League (CCL) race tracks are supposed to be really fast and vast tracks. The problem I encountered here is that at these speeds there is no chance to react fast enough or have a precise idea where you’re at. So for those levels, I decided to make the exception of using collider-free areas through which the Astropilot can fly and anticipate an actual obstacle closing in.

Usually, these exceptions lead to confusion for players, but in this case, I believe it overcomes the benefit. Also, forcing the player to cross some of this ‘sandy’ area to get away from the starting point indicates that they won’t collide with it.