This diary entry is about the editor in Mad Skills Motocross, which will enable players to make their own tracks to share with friends and other players on the Turborilla website. Also, in the video you get a sneak-peek at yet another beautiful parallax-scrolling background.

 

Editor

Editors for games are a good thing, right? The players can then modify/extend the game to increase the longevity of the experience. I think it increases the value of a game by a lot.

My goal when making the editor for Mad Skills Motocross was to make it:

• Easy to use
• Powerful
• Tightly integrated with the game
• Understand the usual undo/redo/cut/copy/paste commands

I am really proud of how the editor turned out. I think I succeeded in all the above points, but only the testers can tell. Here’s a screeenshot:

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There you have the main editor menu. The mini-map at the bottom shows where you are editing right now, and where the bike will start when ‘Play’ is pressed. Those can be changed by clicking in the mini-map with the left and right mouse buttons.

The disabled buttons will be enabled when a part of the track is selected, which is done by clicking on the track. Those buttons are used to raise and lower that part. Easy enough, but what makes the editor so powerful? The ‘interpolators’ do. Technically they are functions, but I call them interpolators since they are used in the editor to interpolate between two heights.

There are currently three interpolators, and you can see their buttons in the above screenshot: Linear, which just creates a straight line between the heights. Cubic, which creates a smooth curve. And Sine, which creates a sine curve (waves). These interpolators, except linear, have parameters that can be adjusted and previewed in real time. This is a screenshot of the cubic interpolator in action:

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The red lines indicate the current selection and the blue lines are a preview of what it would look like if I clicked on ‘Apply’ with these parameter values.

Whenever the track is changed a copy of it is saved in a file named ‘autosave’, which is a real life-saver sometimes. Undo/redo/cut/copy/paste all work like you would expect. And ‘mirror’ does what it says.

Alright, it’s quite powerful and seems easy to use. But in what way is it tightly integrated with the actual game? Well, you see that ‘Play’-button? When you click on that the editor buttons go away and the bike appears and you can start playing your track immediately. No saving, quitting, starting the game, or loading. Just click ‘Play’ and you are playing within half a second.

Let’s demonstrate it with a video:

{flv}editor{/flv}

 

Cool, eh? That track was made by my good friend Stefan, in a few hours, the same day he got his hands on the editor. So I hope that most players who want to, will be able to create their own tracks without the frustration level editors so often result in. By the way, in the video it looks like I’m on crack because I turned up the playback speed a bit to decrease the file size.

In closing

That’s all for now, please discuss and ask questions in the forums, and I will try to answer them as best I can. Also, if you have any ideas that might improve the game, don’t hesitate to bring it up in the forums.

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Take care
// Tobias
Turborilla Entertainment

These diary entries are here for you, the readers. So I would like to know what you think, what you would like to see in the future, and any ideas and questions you might have really.

I have created a forum topic just for this diary entry: discuss here

 

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