Ian Rich

Vextar Map Maker

Vextar Map Maker is a tool I'm working on to ease the pain of building levels in Vextar, a multiplayer action game I'm working on. The maps involve a series of platforms that you traverse as you engage in a deadly disc battle. Each platform has a number of 'launchers' on it that will launch you towards a corresponding platform. The process of setting up the launchers with the appropriate target and required velocity is currently quite tedious and time-consuming, so the main goal is to be able to quickly block out a set of platforms, map their connections, and automagically generate launchers with their appropriate velocity data.

I thought it would be fun to make this a web app that anyone could visit and create a map that will be available in the game, perhaps hosting a gallery of other's creations that could be shared amongst the players of our game. It would also be possible to make this within Unreal as a special mode, so it might go in that direction at some point, but I like prototyping it on a web-accessible platform, and I think web-tech based tools are only growing in viability, so it's good practice in any case.

Feel free to visit the site, and see what state the Vextar Map Maker is in! VextarMapMaker

Check out the source code if you're interested.

Built with the lovely BabylonJS framework.