Make your own Laz0r Frogz levels! (Brainstorming and Level Sharing thread)

September 21

While we were making Laz0r Frogz, I made a tool to help us quickly develop and test levels. It was shared internally here at Schell Games, and we now want to share it with you!

What you Need to Make Laz0r Frogz Levels

Adobe Air
Our Laz0r Frogz Installer
Some sort of Spreadsheet Application

Google Docs
Excel
OpenOffice

A Rich Text Editor

WordPad (Windows)
NotePad++
TextEdit (Mac)

Setting Up

If you haven't already, download and install Adobe Air
Download the Laz0r Frogz installer. Note that if you are using Internet Explorer, it will try to download the .air file as a .zip file. If this happens, just rename the extension from .zip to .air.
Run the installer. Be sure to make note of where the game installs on your computer - you'll need to know this in the future.
Once that's finished, you can either make a copy of this Google Spreadsheet or download this excel spreadsheet.
Open up the spreadsheet!

Making the Levels

The templates will color in the cells appropriately based on what kind of tile you put in. I'd personally recommend looking at the example levels within the spreadsheet before trying to make one from scratch: its helpful to see what a level looks like when its totally filled in.

Note that these instructions are also inside of the Level Template, as well.

Open the "LevelTemplate" tab.
Create your level using the elements in the spreadsheet. Each level MUST have ONE player start and at least one exit. BE SURE TO USE CAPITAL LETTERS.
Once you've finished your level, you'll need to save it as a CSV (comma separated values)! If you're using Google Docs, go to File > Save As... > CSV (Current Sheet). If you're using Excel, go to Save As... > Other Formats > .csv (Comma Delimited).
Open up your .csv file with your text editor of choice.
Select everything and copy the contents of your CSV.
Navigate to where you installed Laz0rFrogzLevelTesting and open laz0rFrogz.xml with the text editor.
In the XML file, look for the first <level> </level> tags and then paste the CSV BETWEEN the <levelData> and </levelData> tags.
Save the XML file.
Run Laz0rFrogzLevelTesting to start the game and play your level!
If you want to make more levels, be sure to copy your original to keep it saved!

Tips and Tricks

You can make the frogs do some pretty tricky stuff by chaining their list of commands - look at the examples given in the LevelTemplate for some ideas.
You can have as many levels as you want in the XML file - all you need to do is keep each within its own set of <level></level> tags.
In this version, you can skip levels by clicking the exit. This makes it super easy to test multiple levels in one XML file!

Sharing the Levels

All you need to do is upload your Laz0rFrogz.xml file to your forum post! Just use the "attach a file" link when replying. People can then download the XML file and put it in their game!

That should be it! If you run into any problems or have questions, post here and let us know!

Nozcumber · September 22

I'm on PC, windows 7. I get to step 6. After some searching I found were the game was actually installed - for me it was:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Laz0rFrogzLevelTesting

I edited the laz0rFrogz.xml file there using notpad++, pasted my copied text in, but was unable to save the file [access to <file> is denied dialog]. And I checked - I am an administrator on my own machine :)

Anyone got any further than this? Be good to see some levels posted here, if just to show people can follow it through.

Laura · September 22

@Nozcumber, thanks for the heads-up! I can't do it right this moment, but in a bit I'll go through the instructions and see if I can recommend a way past that block.

Werehare · September 22

I don't know if this is the best way to solve it, but this worked for me under Windows:

1) Right click on laz0rFrogz.xml
2) Select "Properties" from the menu.
3) Click the "Security" tab on the Properties dialog.
4) Click the "Edit" button.
5) Click on the "Users (Blahblah\Users)" element within the select box at the top of the new dialog.
6) Click the checkbox for "Full control" in the area below.
7) Click "OK".
8) Click "OK" again.
9) Cross your fingers and try again! :D

Oh and I almost forgot:

10) Create new levels and post them on the forum like this...

Errmmmm... How do I attach a file to a post!?

Werehare · September 22

OK. I can't figure it out. I put it elsewhere so here is a link to the laz0rFrogz.xml file. Right-click and Save As...

[EDIT: File attachments are working now. Thanks Dave. I've added the levels lower down in this thread.]

This file contains 4 levels. I should point out that I enjoy making levels in almost any game that allows it and sometimes they can be a little bit on the sadistic side! If you finished the original levels without too much trouble then you should be fine... :D

Dave · September 23

@Werehare I just fixed the permissions for File Uploading and Download. It should now actually be there. Sorry about the confusion!

@Nozcumber I haven't seen that before - I'll post here once I try a few things.

Nozcumber · September 23

Thanks @Werehare - those security shenanigans did the trick for me :)

Nozcumber · September 23

Upload proof included as a test of the level editing/distribution process, rather than to show off any skilz.

I've also successfully managed to download Werehare's levels (and play part of the first one, but I don't dance so well ;)

Werehare · September 23

OK. Here are my levels again. If you downloaded the old one then grab this one instead. At some point during testing I managed to delete the entrance from the 4th level! I played through all the levels again just to be sure and it looks fine now.

If people are having problem with the difficulty then let me know and I'll upload a version with cheat-exits so you can skip through them. (Either that or edit the xml to add them yourself! :) Alternatively you can just reorder or delete the <level> sections as you wish.)

deathbow · September 24

Dave, you left off the list of supplies:

A large bottle of alcohol in case you realize it's all Greek, you're not a programmer, and will never be a programmer. ;)

Werehare · September 25

Here is another xml file.
It's 6 levels but it's really only one. It kind of starts easy and builds on itself.

Werehare · September 25

Sorry for the multi-post. I wanted to change the file (suddenly realized there there was a way to cheat through one of the levels!) and you can re-attach a file to an existing post (or delete the whole post). Anyways, here is it. Anther 6 levels, but they are really only one which has multiple variations. Starts easy and end up crazy.

Kale · October 1

@Werehare , your levels are awesome :)

I recorded my thoughts during my playthrough of them, in case you're curious. Big spoiler warning for anyone who hasn't played werehare's levels and wants to (which you should!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhhGTNeAvys&list=UUgq21HPmXpBhLQWcegkNB0w&index=1&feature=plcp

Werehare · October 1

Wow @Kale,

Thank you for spending the time to play through my levels. Especially well done on completing them! As I said they are a little sadistic, mostly because I was most interested in trying to do clever things with the level engine rather than making something really well balanced.

What you said about the first level being frustrating because you didn't want to have to keep walking through the earlier phases is something I kind of tried to fix with the second level set. In that case I had an idea for a single difficult level and created a number of increasingly difficult ramping-up levels kind of like with the first level in this set. (I still think that the last level in the new set is a little unfair though!)

I did play with the idea of having the frogs further out in the 3rd level but if they are too far apart then it actually becomes possible to solve a gate by cheating and getting one frog to fire out of sequence to another (because the shots move quite slowly and the frogs turn quick quickly). It's fixable by slowing the sequence down but then the level just takes forever. The feedback is still valid though. I'm sure there is a clever way to make it work smoother. I just got lazy once I got the level working!

Also I didn't realize you could get out of the second level without killing the frog in the top left, so well done! The intention was to make the player jump through a load of hoops before killing the two frogs which were the easiest to kill in the level! :)

Anyways, thank again for playing and recording. It's really interesting seeing someone else playing a level. I may or may not have laughed several times when the level caught you out and fried poor Jasper. I've really got to ask myself why he'd ever go back into that maze after escaping the first time! :D

Kale · October 1

No problem, they were tons of fun :)

And yea, that's a good point about your reason not to space the frogs out more in level 3. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Laura · October 10

@Nozcumber and @Werehare, I played your levels a couple weekends ago but got shy about posting the video... you'll see, I'm not a very skilled Laz0r Fr0gs player and I yell and sigh way too much. I got over it, though, so here they are. =P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJMctF8SuTY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKK4qhtx5O4

I'm looking forward to posting a level or two of my own sometime soon... I didn't get to play around with this back when we were putting the episode together because I was busy with the launch, so it's been fun to get to check it out. Expect lots of hats!

Werehare · October 10

Thank you for playing and posting the videos. I always get a kick out of seeing other people play levels I've made, especially the moments like "Where are the hats!?" or the moment when people figure out the level. Do the actual developers get that feeling I wonder? It kind of makes me feel guilty for editing out all the errors from the walkthrough I did!

ps. If you want more levels to play then check out the second xml file I posted. It's got different levels in it! I'm not sure if it was obvious that I posted a second set of levels or whether people thought it was the same set again.

Laura · October 10

Yeah, definitely! I was glad you guys were able to navigate the setup despite the permissions difficulties, and it was neat to see the different directions you took with level creation. =D

And yeah, for a walkthrough it makes a lot of sense to edit the errors out -- it helps people get the overview of the levels / info of how to beat them much faster. For this though, I figured getting to see those thought processes might be interesting -- it was funny even for me, watching back through the video and getting to hear the gears in my head turning. ("Ha, take that! Oh no! Oh no... Oh, no!")

@Werehare, your second xml file was actually the first one I downloaded and tried, but there were cheat-exits blocking my way on all the levels, so I downloaded the other xml file instead. I don't think there's a good way for me to remove the cheat-exits short of trying to recreate the levels... if you can get rid of them and send the file back out, though, I'll definitely give it a try! Also, when you're making and testing levels, you can just click on an exit to skip past the level -- so no need for cheat-exits in the future. =)

Werehare · October 10

Wow... How the heck have I missed that for so long!?

FYI: I didn't use the spread sheet to create any of my levels in the end. I found it a lot easier just to edit the xml file with a text editor. I'm a programmer though so I'm used to csv formatted stuff. Also good hint about clicking on the exits! I saw that in the video as well.

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