Transcript:

Hey everybody and welcome back to another Gravity Ace devlog. This one’s a bit late because I took a break and went to Disneyland on Sunday. The new Star Wars ride is dope.

I spent the week working on making the level editing experience nicer. The focus was on creating brushes that let you draw out cave walls in a natural way. I’m a little under the weather so I’m going to show you a small level being created using the new tools so you don’t have to hear my sick gravelly voice too much.n

The video is sped up. This took about 20 minutes of real time.

I’ve implemented a few different brush shapes. What you’re seeing here is the default brush. It’s a little bumpy but it doesn’t have a bunch of jaggy edges and it’s mostly round. You can see how you can quickly create a wall, rotate it, move it, then draw some more wall on top of it and it merges them into a single shape.

You can also erase with any of the brushes.

If you look closely you can see the brush outline rotates randomly as you draw. It really makes creating organic looking shapes MUCH faster than the old way of moving vertices around. I’m finding that I’m creating shapes I never would have created before which is cool.

You can also still move, add, and remove individual vertices for fine control or details. Maybe you need a specific area to be perfectly flat or at a certain angle, for example.

Here I’m placing some enemies to test out the corridor width. You can jump back and forth between editing and playing seamlessly.

Here’s an example of the rough brush.

As I place more props and enemies you can see how they snap to the nearest wall and orient themselves in the direction of the wall normal. Again, just speeds things up and you can still fine tune placement and rotation of every prop and enemy by hand.

Watch how I weld these two pieces together.

Now I’m going around the edge of the level and using the in-game camera guides to show me where to place more rock. I’m trying to make it so that the player can’t see space on the outside of the cave by extending the walls outwards.

This UI for connecting signals to verbs on other objects needs work. It’s FUNCTIONAL but I’d like to be able to do it all with the mouse and not need to worry about Entity IDs. This triggers the exit beacon when the reactor core is beamed or destroyed.

Now for some space grass and furniture.

That’s it for now. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Please join the DISCORD server if you’d like to try out the game, help test it, and provide feedback. I’d love to hear your suggestions. All DISCORD users will also receive a launch discount so come join today. The DISCORD link is at GRAVITY ACE DOT COM.

Thanks and see you next time!