Evolving level art from Swords & Soldiers 1 to 2
In Swords & Soldiers 2 we are stepping up the quality of everything compared to the original. Level art is one of the areas where we are improving the game a lot. With our improved tools we can make them look a lot more detailed and varied. We also approach level art in a very different way now. Today I would like to discuss how the approaches in both games differ and why we switched to different techniques. In the original Swords & Soldiers the levels were mostly procedurally generated. The only parts that were placed by hand were the ground itself and the small props on it, like grass and flowers. The foreground and background layers were randomly filled with objects. Since this is essentially a 1D game I simply wrote an algorithm that placed mountains (or trees, or houses) at varying distances from each other. Each layer had a bunch of different textures and settings for how densely it should be filled with objects. There are many arguments in favour of procedurally placing...