Level Design in Somnipathy: Building the Apartment

Making Somnipathy
Saturday 4/2/22, Around 1 PM:

Zaknafean: HVC, make the apartment.
HVC: Uhh. sounds like an art team problem to me.
Zaknafean: Nah, all the assets are already done. Okay, look at my screen, I’m going to show you how to make a tile map.
HVC: Alright I’m watching.
*Zaknafean demonstrates how to tile a png within Godot*
Zaknafean: Got it? Cool, make the apartment!
HVC: The whole thing?
Zaknafean: The whole thing!

And thus was decided the next 8ish hours of my life!

Tile mapping in Godot is weirdly simple and you can do it to literally any png. Each room was a new ‘Scene’ and to that Scene you add a ‘Navigation2D’ child node. From there, you can add a TileMap child node to your ‘Navigation2D’ node.

After setting up those nodes, you simply import your png into the Tile Set section (which is hopefully at the correct pixel resolution… thank you @whiskeybadger!), align the image with the origin, and you can start picking squares that will act as paint swatches that you can draw on. You can then draw the Nav Mesh on your squares such that Aggy will not be able to navigate off of the map you’ve drawn! Because Godot is flexible, you can have multiple tile maps on the same Navigation plane (pictured above), which can all be individually modulated, this is how I have differential alpha channels for the transparency of the back/east walls vs the south/west walls.



As you all have found through play, there are six rooms in the game: The Bedroom, Living Room, Kitchen, Hallway, I Do Not Know This Room, and I Do Not Like This Room. You’ve also probably noticed that the rooms change the further you get into the game. This is tied to a modifier called ‘difficulty’ and difficulty changes based on the number of thresholds you’ve crossed (Difficulty 2: >= 4 doors, Difficulty 3: >= 8 doors). Rather than making a different ‘Scene’ for each room and each difficulty (that would be 24 scenes!!!), all of the assets as well as the hue change is already present in every room, and are revealed when the number of doors crossed through hits the correct value.



It was a really cool and enjoyable experience (despite the time pressure) to be able to contribute to making the levels for our game in a way I had no idea I would be capable of. After all, I'm no artist... but it turns out, all I needed was some creativity and attention to detail, and the basic png that @whiskeybadger drew was more than enough!

-HighVoltageCatfish (Zakahrum)