Brendan' Blog

Hello my name is Brendan. I am a game systems programmer. For Boomerblade though, I worked on creating the levels, through designs given to me by Thom Cote. Before getting the designs though, I did prototyping of what a level in our game would be. For the ground, we used tilesets that included grass, grass edges, grass particles. For the dirt, we actually used cubes textured with our dirt texture. The tileset was used in 3 layers, you had the grass base, grass particles 1, and grass particles 2. This allowed us to create areas of dense grass foliage. The edge of the player area is actually a single mesh cube that acts like a wall. I then placed trees along this wall. A singular wall along the border of the playable area allows the boomerang mechanic to be simplified and optimized. For inner trees, trees that are within the player area, we used a simple cube to for collision. On a good week, I could get at least 2 level out per week. When I pushed these levels out, these levels were not gameplay ready. This was intentional as to keep pace with our production timeline. All in all, making this game was a great experience.