This month I've been developing a new system to streamline the creation of Unicycle Frenzy maps so that maps can be made at a much faster pace. Up until this point, every map started from scratch which gave us a lot of flexibility to make each map look and feel unique but because of the amount of time and effort to properly polish these maps, only a few have actually been finished.
So I shifted my thinking about how the maps should be made and instead of building each map from scratch we can use premade modular pieces and Hammer's tilesets to quickly build out a track while also having it look good.
Some early concepts
It didn't take long to get something up and going and I slowly started to add more elements over time to help ground everything.
I wanted to give things a little more flare than just a track surrounded by canvas towers so we started developing some scenery with help from Louie.
And finally, we added some signage with help from Lewis to fill in some empty spaces and give it a greater feeling of authenticity. Here's a video of a nearly complete track with how everything looks together.
I'm very happy with how the modular/tileset method is working so far, I think we've been able to get a lot of diversity with how each track feels and there are still a lot of ways we can expand things in the future. Instead of it taking a month plus to finish one map now they can be made in a matter of days. The maps lose some visual uniqueness with this method but I think the trade-off is in our favor, being able to quickly make maps will allow us to create way more content than we otherwise could.
