Medusa's Level Editor

During the creation of Medusa, I was also responsible for creating a level editor, so we could easily make levels for the game. The editor was developed using C# and managed DirectX. The editor needed to be fairly robust to accomplish the needs of the game. The map for the game was tile based and the editor can handle grabbing tiles from various images and various sized images and placing them on the map. After some research, I was able to create a fill, or "paintbucket", algorithm that allows for filling an area with the selected tile. This was very useful for large areas.

Docks level

The editor is capable of placing objects like environmental objects (boxes, submarines, etc), enemies, and powerups. This made it easy to fill areas with objects and enemies to keep the environments changing and posing a threat to the player. Various triggers can also be placed and sized around the map quickly with the editor. Placing collision boxes to keep the player from walking through the walls, triggers that spawn enemies when a player enters a room, and triggers that cause the lights to flicker can be added in no time flat.

Lab level

With some help from Luis Lairet, we were able to add lights and see their effects in real-time in the editor. This helped with level creation immensely, since we could see exactly how the lights would look in the levels as we were working on them. Making this tool allowed for rapid development of the levels in the game.