Darkwind Media Blog

Over the past year or so, one amazingly handy use for Luster has become very apparent: tools and utilities. Luster is incredibly fast to develop in, very easy to modify, and powerful enough to be flexible. These are the exact traits that make it an amazing platform for building game tools. One thing that a game team does not want to get bogged down in is the creation of their tools. They are, after all, trying to make a game, not a game tool. Luster has allowed me to create quick and easy level editors, or utilities, without putting in very much effort. Many of these tools took less than a week to craft, and could be maintained and modified throughout the project’s lifetime with minimal effort.

These are images from the level editor for the single player version of Bombs. Bombs was never released, and the single player puzzle version of the game was very experimental. This editor made it easy to quickly prototype levels. The editor itself took only a couple of days to set up, and was then maintained and evolved throughout the game prototyping process. It was simple and effective, allowing us to quickly set up quite elaborate levels.

A lot has been shown of Blocks lately. The editor has been critical to setting up this project in the short amount of time we have (so far, Blocks is only 3 weeks old). The editor allows fast level creation totally integrated within the Blocks engine. With a single button press you can switch from editing a level to playing it and back. It makes level making fun, fast, and effective.

This is a recent project. An observation I made was that a large amount of time was spent managing, copying, or rewriting old shader and materials, and then tweaking those materials for a project. Without a visual material editor, tweaking was a painful process of changing a variable in a script, re-running the project to see the effect, and then quitting it to go back and tweak some more. This material editor makes it very simple to apply materials, change their properties, and export them for easy integration into any project. The editor exports all you need: materials, shaders, and textures. The functionality here is all done, all within 1 week. The main effort now is simply filling up the library of available materials for artists to apply to their models. This will be a huge time-saver and probably also increase the overall quality of the materials produced.

So, you can see how Luster has made itself incredibly useful in this area. There’s plenty more tools I have plans to make. We are certainly open to creating these kinds of tools for other people’s projects as well. Just contact us and let us know how Luster can help.