Devlog 2 - Basic Level Blocking

I have blocked out a basic office level with two enemies and a hostage in the large lounge area at the end. Once all the props and entities are added I will add them to this test scene.

The camera has also begun to follow the player since the last devlog. There is a custom script I made which smoothly moves the camera in the direction of the mouse. The distance the camera "looks ahead" is locked within the screen bounds and is the same for all resolutions/aspect-ratios (this was not trivial).

Tilesets

I have two separate tilesets:

A thin wall palette (8x8 pixels per tile)

And a thicker floor palette (16x16 pixels per tile)

I combined the two together by using different tile grid objects (pictured below).

The floor grid has a cell size of 1 unit (16 pixels in my case). Its tiles have no collider and render below the player.

The wall grid has a cell size of 0.5 units (8 pixels). Its tiles have a composite collider and render above the player.

Inspiration

The general art style and structure of the environment was primarily inspired by Hotline Miami (pictured below).

Image Source

The overall style is quite different but I used the same technique for doing wall corners and used similar sizing.

Problems Encountered

For a while I had a problem with flickering gaps/seams between tiles. I assumed that this was because of subpixel movements on the camera causing the tiles to transform unevenly. I tried using a pixel-perfect camera but it made the movement feel awful and jittery. What eventually fixed it was adding a padded border around each tile to source extra colour from. Since doing that the issue has disappeared. I'm guessing its a UV float-precision thing but I can't say for sure.

I also had issues with getting tiles of different sizes to work. I initially put both tilesets in the same palette by splitting the big tiles into 4 small tiles, but this was tedious, janky, and probably really bad for performance. Eventually I just decided to separate them completely and put both tilesets on differently sized grids.

User Feedback

There were concerns that shooting through the thin walls may be an issue in future (I plan to fix this by having a raycast in front of the player to detect walls)