LEVELS
Paint Knight, inspired by games like Hollow Knight or Super Mario, has the player navigating multiple different rooms with many nooks and crannies to explore. In total, Paint Knight contains six total rooms (seven on a technicality) that slowly become more challenging and introduce the new brushes before ending with the corrupted Roller Knight as a boss.
The overall design for the rooms is meant to evoke a castle with the lights out. All the color has been drained away with only the material and structures remaining, patrolled by the corrupted enemies. Super Mario castle levels served as strong inspiration when approaching the tile set design while also keeping them consistent with the style of the characters.
A key piece of creating the intended eerie atmosphere is the use of particles. All the rooms contain at least one or two “fog” particle streams running from left to right. The fog serves two purposes within the rooms: 1) It creates a sense of emptiness and abandonment, and 2) It helps separate the foreground level from the background wall and decorations. With the “energy” particles floating upward, that was actually inspired by the Taken from Destiny 2, creating the sense of a “living corruption” having made itself at home within the castle walls Paint Knight is exploring.
Peeling back what is seen in game, multiple systems work together to bring the rooms of Paint Knight to life. All rooms (except for the public court) are connected to a trigger system that detects if the player is within it. If the player is within the trigger associated with the room, the room and all within it activates. If the player is outside a trigger (leaving one room for the next), the room itself and everything within off.
Related to that is both the camera and teleport systems used to get the player from each room and to make sure the camera moves from room to room without showing any de-spawning or empty space. Quickly going over both systems, the camera(s) have multiple boxes that the camera will teleport to depending on which room is currently “active.” Each room also contains a camera bounding box that limits where the camera can go, stopping the player from viewing outside the rooms.
For the teleporters, each one is in fact a prefab (clones of the original) that designates itself as a sender. The script asks for a game object to act as its receiver to send the player along with what direction to have the player facing when they come out the other side.
