teaching machines

HNRS 304.503 Lab 4 – Tiled platformer

October 22, 2012 by . Filed under fall 2012, honors 304.503, labs.

Game design is not for coders alone. In this three-week lab, you and your chosen partner (not the same as you partnered with for lab 3), will create a tile-based platformer whose levels can be designed in a plain old text editor.

For example, I might have a level comprised of blue spheres and orange cubes. Instead of laying the scene out in Unity’s scene view, I compose the following text file:

B B B B B B
 O O O O O 
B B B B B B
 O O O O O 
B B B B B B

Easy!

I read that file in a Unity script, parse its contents, and instantiate prefabs to fill the scene. The result is nice:

A scene in Unity whose game objects are generated from a text file.

This kind of system lets coders code and designers design. (Even if you fill both roles, game tools like level editors are invaluable!) Your task is to create a game that uses a level loader in this fashion.

Requirements

Consider the following as you create a game: