Section Transitions

You may have noticed that all of my demos so far involve a single level (I call them Sections in code). Of course, this won't do for a real game, so I implemented a few things so that we can trigger changes from one level to another.

1. Introduced the Section Registry to the Asset Editor program. The section registry is more or less a list of all the sections in the game. Its primary purpose, for the time being, is to bind file names to section titles, so this screenshot is a bit bare:

So, I've used the level editor to create two maps, and then I've registered them as sections in the asset editor--and titled them Level 1 and Level 2.

2. Added a method hook on the Game Interface that can be called from scripts, called 'ChangeSection.' See the screenshot on how this is used:

What this says is that when the player collides with this entity (seen in the screenshot as one of those invisible triggers, placed right outside the border of the section), a message is sent to the game to change sections, with a few parameters:

• The level name, seen above as Level 2. The section registry is used to find the corresponding level file to load.
• The tag of an entity representing the target location (where the player will be standing), seen above as 'right'. Oh, I added a 'tag' field to entities and re-purposed the collision categories screen as a general 'entity properties' screen. See screenshot below to see how an entity on Level 2 was tagged.

• The last parameter is a description of a well-known transition type. In this case, we're moving left a section, so the parameter value is 'left'. 

For now, up/down/left/right are supported, as you'll see in the video, but I wanted to make this abstract enough for other transition types. For example, when entering a cave, much of the logic is the same: we need a target section and a place to put the player when they enter, but we'll probably want to fade to black and then fade in from black, or do a screen wipe, or something like that. Same with going up stairs and down stairs, or falling in a pit, or whatever else the game requires.

Anyway, enough writing, on with the video! Here's me running around two very similar levels as a demo. Note that because level transitions can go anywhere, we can even have a level transition into itself, as shown near the end of the video! And because transitions are controlled via script, we can write levels with strange transitions (for example, a door that takes you to a different level or target position depending on whether a switch is hit, or if you have less than 1 heart left, etc).