Indie Game // Photshop level construction

Illustrator proved great for making quick changes to our pixel characters and environments, but not so good when we needed precision, such as in assembling the game worlds. While Andy was working on improving the detail in the environment blocks, I set about making a structure for us to import them into a Photoshop grid. This was essential as it allows us to lay out an entire map of blocks as smart objects and if any changes need to be made, they are automatically all updates. This will save us a load of work later down the line

This proved to be way more complicated than we anticipated, with there being some difference in the ways photoshop interprets vector files as pixels.

We discovered that by copying and pasting blocks into PS from illustrator as a smart object, we could create multiple instances of the object and have any changes made apply instantly to all of the spaces we had used it in. In order for this to be accurate, I set a grid that matched the size of our blocks and subdivided them in to the 20x 20 squares we had used to make them. I had to set the grid to a colour that we had not used in any of the designs so it could be always visible.

This is where it started to get complicated. 

The first issue was our crisp vector blurring in PS, which turned out could be solved by unticking the 'anti-alias' preference. We also switched to using the college computers with cs6, as they have improved the way PS handles vectors.

Next, we realised that no matter how we imported the vectors, they never seemed to fit the grid correctly. This turned out to be a fault in which photoshop would interpret the width or height as slightly more than 100%, leading the object to stretch unexpectedly. We had to go through by hand as we were working and correct this back to 100% on both axis.

After these issues were solved, i sent to newly set up document to our dropbox so that Andy coul begin to put together the levels.