Scaffold Level Editor

Summary

On the latest Nightshift Galaxy weekly dev stream I demonstrated the specialized level editting tool I’m building inside the Unreal Level Editor that I’m calling Scaffold. VIDEO I gave an impromptu introduction to my motivations and inspirations live, but on reflection the topic deserves a written deep-dive. In designing tools I’m guided by three high-level goals: Productivity. As a solo-developer, I need to automate as much of my workflow as possible, to ensure that I focus on places where my specific skill-set adds value, and avoid labor-intensive tasks that aren’t core to gameplay. Individuality. A risk of using a generic game engine, like Unreal or Unity, and common marketplace assets is producing a generic game. By developing unique systems, I can enable unique gameplay that has market differentiation. Performance. As an action game with a high skill-ceiling there is no “correctness vs. performance” tradeoff; 60+ FPS is a correctness requirement. Furthermore, in my experience, to confidently reach a larger audience with midrange commodity devices, one can’t simply chip-away at perf problems in the profiler later – one must architect for it. Scaffold addresses these goals by exposing (i) an interactive interior design tool that prioritizes power-user hotkeys and hackability, (ii) gameplay systems that supplement Unreal’s built-in collision and navigation with opinionated parallel systems, and (iii) data-structures (inspired by 90s game engines) that are efficient by-construction. Background: Convex Decomposition To explain the details of the system, we need to first establish some background in Convex Geometry that’s relevant to the design. In a nutshell, the convex hull property describes any shape where the straight-line connecting any two points within the shape is also contained in the shape. Sample Convex Shapes in 2D This is in contrast to concave shapes that have notches or holes cut out of them. Sample Concave Shapes in 2D Most spatial algorithms in game...