LevelCraft | Devpost

Inspiration

I've always wanted to create a world/template within Meta Horizon that had a great foundation to work with to speed up and assist with common world and game development. Normally when I created games and worlds, I would have to spend countless hours curating, creating and collecting a lot of the same assets over and over before beginning the fun process of actually building out my games. When this open source competition was announced, it was a great excuse to finally dive deep and fulfil this need, while at the same time offering something useful to the community and other creators as well! Thus the remixable LevelCraft world was finally born!

What it does

LevelCraft was created to be first and foremost a template others could use to build out their own games and worlds with relative ease. The template is broken down into 4 zones that help guide the user on how to best go about creating a world from scratch (although users can certainly take their own path in creating their games with this template as well). These 4 zones in many cases are critical in most successful games and worlds in Meta Horizon. LevelCraft comes with its own sample level and game mechanics to draw inspiration from. The sample level was kept very simple, with the hopes that users can see the potential of LevelCraft and create something different and even nicer than the sample level provided. The entire world was created in a way to encourage users to use their imagination and think of what could be created with LevelCraft as their foundational starting point. With what's currently included, users can quickly create anything from a simple coin collecting game, to a crop harvesting game, and anything else they can think of. The possibilities are endless! Users can see when entering the world all the different assets available to them, test things out, see how things work, before finally choosing to remix their own game/world themselves!

How we built it

LevelCraft was built by curating the most useful and crucial assets that I've used throughout the years building worlds within Meta Horizon. Only the most critical assets were placed into the scene to keep the world template lightweight and optimized, leaving a lot of capacity room for the user to place in their own custom assets and scripts on top of what LevelCraft provides. Plenty of in-world documentation and instruction fields are placed throughout the scene, helping users even further learn how certain scripts and assets work, how to use them and to keep things stress-free when putting everything together.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out what to include in LevelCraft was a challenge. I know I didn't want to throw in every script and asset ever created/collected into this template. I wanted to keep things lite and not overbearing/overwhelming for other users. Deciding which assets to include and more importantly which ones to leave out was something that took me a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall I think LevelCraft is a remixable world that achieved the main goal I was hoping to accomplish with it which was to make game and world creation just that much more enjoyable and easy to do within Meta Horizon. The zones in the template also proved to be extremely useful and really did hasten the build process which I was very happy about. I love creating worlds and this is something I would have loved to have had much earlier in my building journey. I'm excited to use this myself, but also see how others utilize it as well!

What we learned

Building a world to be remixable was something new. A lot of considerations had to be made, more-so than I've had to do in the past. Knowing others will have access to the same world in the desktop editor made me really want to put a lot of effort into making things as optimized and straight forward to use as possible. A lot of drawing up ideas and initial planning was done before beginning any work, and the time associated with that is something I will remember for the next remixable world creation as well!

What's next for LevelCraft

This is essentially version 1 of LevelCraft! I think it could become something even greater with more updates, support and new version releases. I want to make it as useful to the public as possible, so I'd love to bring more people in to help improve it further at some point, as well as collect as much feedback as I possibly can in order to update it to a state that would make LevelCraft truly worthy of it's name and have it be a great starting point for beginners and veteran world builders alike!