What's the best way to build levels in game salad?

OLZ1

I am making a top- down shooter in gamesalad for the ios platform.

I have recently started building the levels for the game and i'm wondering what the most effective way to do this is. Currently, it seems like I have to draw out the level in my graphics software, with each piece of the environment as an individual object, then export each individual part of the environment as a seperate image then import them into gamesalad, and then position each one of them on the scene seperately, which takes a lot of time.

Is there a more effective way to do this which takes a lot less time?

One idea that I had, if it is possible, would be to draw the whole level out in the graphics software with black outlines around all the walls, kind of like a cartoon, then import this single image into the game and write code so that when the player's character touches the black outline they would stop moving, so it would basically act as though there was a immovable sprite there, hence this would mean I could draw everything out once in perfect position and import it once and then I would be done.

Any replies or suggestions on the fastest way to build levels in GS would be appreciated. Thanks in advance

jonmulcahy

gamesalad doesn't have any pixel level collisions, but there is nothing preventing you from creating the master image in Photoshop (or whatever), the putting invisible collision boxes in the right areas.

it's a pain, but level design isn't something you want to rush

OLZ1

@jonmulcahy said:
gamesalad doesn't have any pixel level collisions, but there is nothing preventing you from creating the master image in Photoshop (or whatever), the putting invisible collision boxes in the right areas.

it's a pain, but level design isn't something you want to rush

Cheers for the reply. I guess this means that I would just have to carry on doing what I was doing then, as positioning invisible collision boxes could cause problems of its own such as invisible walls in the wrong places.

Hopscotch

@OLZ1, why would you have "invisible walls in the wrong places"?

@jonmulcahy‌ 's suggestion is widely used. Draw the background image, then place collision walls over the scene, these just containing a Change Attribute self.color.alpha = 0. This makes it easy to see what you are doing when laying out the scene, but automatically turning invisible at run time.