Hello everyone, hope you’re all having a great start to the week! This week we’re going to begin showing off our Creative tools that will be available day one of Slaughter League’s launch. As writing these blog posts and creating the material for them takes time away from development I’m going to be splitting these into chunks over the coming weeks and discussing each core feature and design decision in as much detail as possible. With that said, it makes sense to start from the very beginning of the Creative experience in Slaughter League. From the main menu, Creative will have its own space to dive into others’ user-built stages, tutorials, and the tools as a whole. When creating a new stage, you are immediately hit with two options: Location and Mode template. Want to build a stage inside a volcano? Space? Jungle? Go for it. Locations do not affect the gameplay in any crazy way, so it is more about aesthetics. The main difference between the locations is how the players will die from falling beneath “ground level”, whether that be falling (space), getting eaten by sharks (default) or slowly descending into lava (volcano). Mode templates are a very important decision when going to Creative with an idea in mind. As many of you saw in the demo, Slaughter League has a huge array of unique game modes. And as many of you are aware, Slaughter Leaguer will feature tools to build your very own game modes too. So why does this matter? To keep things simple for newbie creators, selecting a mode template will ready the stage builder with everything you will need for that mode to work, so focus can be spent on the levels instead. For example, the Race mode template will start with a Start Line object and a Finish Line object as these are essential to the Race game mode. The Zombie mode template will start with at least one Zombie Spawn Point object and one Survivor Spawn Point object. The Custom mode template allows advanced users to start with a complete blank canvas to build anything they like (stage and mode). [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/39122387/e9b8d637664b3842b4050c0b11a2da1a98ebd5e4.gif[/img] Once the player has loaded the stage they are free to begin forging their ideas. By default, players can pan the camera (left, right, up and down) to navigate their world in a 2D plane. As the gameplay of Slaughter League is a 2.5D platformer, the main focus is 2D, but players can easily place objects in the foreground and background which I will demonstrate in a future post. To begin spawning new objects, players can head to the Object Browser to look at the selection of objects on offer. Each item has an associated cost and stage has a set budget which must be adhered to. As much as we’d love to offer unlimited of any type of object, we don’t want to obliterate our servers or everybody’s computers. Additionally, for the more intensive objects (such as cannons, tesla coils, flamethrowers etc.) there is hard caps on a per object basis which we will be monitoring and adjusting as we head to launch. After an object is selected and browser is allowed to spawn it, we can then begin placing our new item in the world. Placing objects is super simple, especially with the many snapping features available (which we’ll also go into more detail in a future post). Every object from the demo (and many many more) will be available in the Object Browser so you will be able to create anything we made, but even better! Every single stage in Slaughter League will be made using the in-game tools, and our stages will all be editable too. This means players will be able to see what techniques we use to build our stages to learn from. To close this blog post, I’d just like to show you the small, limited selection of items we have available in our current build. This is just the beginning. That’s all today, thank you for reading and I hope you’re looking forward to more Creative updates. Any questions, fire away in general. Cheers, Adam