S.T.E.A.L.T.H.: Making a Level

This is my first post in a series of walkthroughs I'm going to do for GameMaker n00bs, or n00bs to game design in general. Today, I'm going to show you how I make my levels in S.T.E.A.L.T.H., as well as give you a few level design pointers.



There are no objects in this room at the time. What you are looking at is the first room in S.T.E.A.L.T.H.. What you see in the room are tiles, which are actually background images. What I do first is I design the room using tiles. Then....



...I cover all of the boxes and level boundaries with my wall object. This object has visibility unchecked, so it's not visible. Essentially, these are invisible walls, but they are covering up the background tiles. Because they are invisible, you cannot see them, therefore, you only see the background tile, and not the ugly Stealth Engine wall block. This also makes the level creation process simpler, as I only have one wall object, as opposed to several wall objects that are exactly the same, except for a different sprite.



The final step is to add the enemy objects and the player object. What I do here, is I move the room I'm working on to the top of the rooms folder (so that it's the first in the list). That way, it'll load up first when running the game, thus making for some really easy playtesting, as opposed to playing through the entire game just to get to this one level. Placement of walls and enemy units is key here. Do it wrong, and you could have a level that is impossible, too easy, or just looks plain ugly. Playtest your level when you make it, and make sure there's no bugs and that it works perfectly. If it doesn't work right, or you find a way for the player to exploit the level (therefore getting through it easier), go back into the room editor and fix it. Then, run the game again to test it. You want to keep doing this until your level is perfect.

When I release S.T.E.A.L.T.H., I'm going to do four releases: "S.T.E.A.L.T.H.", "S.T.E.A.L.T.H. with .gmk", "S.T.E.A.L.T.H. with .gmk and Stealth Engine .gmk", and "Stealth Engine with .gmk". That way, players will be able to make their own levels. To ensure compatibility with GameMaker7 "Lite", the introductory sequence for S.T.E.A.L.T.H. will not be included in the .gmk. The purpose of these guides is to help improve your skills at level design if you decide to do custom levels for S.T.E.A.L.T.H..