Harvest:
Environment Art
Toolkit
Unreal Engine, C++, Blueprint
The Mission:
Towerborne missions are made of several stages of various widths and shapes (straight, dogleg, ramp, etc.), as well as global skybox and background levels. The ask from the environment art team was for a toolkit that could help speed up the time front concept to finish for the hundreds of stage variations. For a live-ops project with a potential of several new biomes per season, it was imperative to provide the tooling.
Artist Requests:
Quicker way to find and load levels
Load different background and skybox levels
Load adjacent levels left and right to check for set dressing continuity
Utilities for checking foreground to background distance and player scale
Camera utility for a live game camera preview
Asset validation and sanity checker
Asset placement/orientation helpers for matching cards to camera view
The First Rev
The original setup of the toolkit started as an editor utility widget
Slate Version
The editor utility blueprint quickly grew into a large node network and required code changes already to expose custom nodes. Having a good template with the node logic to go off of, I made the choice to switch to native code in Slate.
Features:
Dropdowns to filter biome and sub-biome level lists
Main and left/right adjacent level loading
Accessory level loading, background and skybox
Editor utility loading for player scale, distance tool and camera
Mock game camera preview with manual and animated movement
Spawned utilities are transient, eliminating accidental saving into the level
Asset validation and level sanity checker with checks for:
Blueprint actor ticking
Blueprint actor component mobility settings
Lighting mobility settings
Background and skybox levels saved in persistent level