Owlboy feels like a cinematic 16-bit platformer, decorated with set pieces the likes of which you might find peppered throughout modern blockbusters. He does his bit-and his bit is not insignificant-but he still can’t change anything. Each time Otus rebukes his reputation as an idiot-each time he overcomes hazards, puzzles and death-his failure to properly seal the wrath of the pirates is what defines the narrative. In videogame terms, Otus will successfully reach the end of levels and beat a number of bosses, but for the citizens of Vellie and the nearby metropolis of Advent, no crisis is properly averted. Otus is dragged in to help fight them, often inadvertently, along with his cannonball-shooting friend Geddy.ĭuring the opening hours, each of Otus’s successes dovetail with a broader failure. This locale is being harried by pirates in search of sacred and immensely powerful owl relics which, if held all at once, grant immense and destructive power. It doesn’t hurt that he lives inside one of the most lushly illustrated pixel-art worlds in recent memory: all bulbous white clouds, blue skies and hypnotic, parallax greens. The other upside to doing both graphics and collision through the same bitmap is that it's really straightforward to do deformable terrain and communicate the results to the player.Because other owls are mean to him, it’s easy to love Otus immediately. It meant that the designers were already familiar with all the ins and outs of their "level editor" and could start designing levels right out of the gate. There are obvious downsides, but on the upside, the DMA Design guys were already pretty dab hands at (iirc) Deluxe Paint. ![]() I think of the one honkin' bitmap as the "Lemmings style". Just as a brain-twister, it'd be pretty cool to set up a level as one bitmap and then define all animations as cellular automata. I wouldn't dare do that for the foreground though. There wouldn't be much waste, because compressing sparse, few-color bitmaps is exactly what PNG does best. Granted it *was* tile-based, each tile just one pixel, but I bet you could actually have a full-size map as one honkin' PNG, provided it was *only* for collision/spawn data. Kinda related, Metagun used PNGs for map data. Also 2d collision detection can get pretty wonky if you don't know what you are doing. Using their editor will save you the trouble of having to write one in your game engine. I am a big fan of Unit圓D and they recently (last year) added support for 2d platforming games. Once the Dev has the level to his liking he saves the offsets and platform indexes to a file that will be loaded when the player enters the level in the actual game. The dev may need to shift the platform around a bit, but this should be a fairly fast process if the level editor and play test tool are one an the same. ![]() In the level editor the dev would create an instance of a platform then place it in the world and play test it to make sure the player can reach it. Chances are Owlboy is made of platform objects that contain a sprite, offset, and collier values. There is a lot of empty space that is wasted memory, and making minor changes to the level would be difficult since you would have to modify the texture then modify the collier logic. ![]() Making a level as one giant texture is not a good idea.
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