After playing through Torchlight I decided to try my hand at the editor (TorchED) in my spare time.  The editor is quite easy to get into, allowing for relatively quick creation of environments using the assets from the retail version of the game.  It also comes with a particle editor, logic scripting capabilities, and the ability edit and create a wide variety of other game objects.

So after a couple video tutorials and some plain old messing around I cobbled together a sketch of a level idea and dove in.  These short blog entries will briefly chronicle my progress over the next little while; I don’t expect this level to take too long to create.  I don’t plan on doing any sort of TorchED tutorial posts, these are more of a development diary for the mod.  Posted after the break are the plans and screenshots for the first section of the level.

Layout plan for the Crypt section of the level.

For each section of the level (I suppose I should be saying dungeon) I first draw up a diagram of the layout.  This one was fudged a bit, since I had already built part of the level before deciding on the rest, but it follows the same organization as the other plans.  Blue tiles are water, green areas spawn enemies, orange (kind of) boxes are triggers, red circles are lights, and yellow circles are sounds.  Some objects come with lights and sounds attached to them, but additional ones are added as needed.

The first section of the level is crypt-themed and is very short.  It is the first of four main sections: the crypt, cave, forest, and mansion.  Each of these are subdivided for organization purposes and will be detailed more when I get to those sections.

The crypt section in TorchED.

My custom level isn’t that similar to how levels are done in the actual Torchlight game.  In Torchlight dungeons are composed of premade chunks that are semi-randomly pieced together based on their connection points.  Each chunk is developed within a single theme (as far as I can tell) so that when they are pieced together the look is consistent.  Each section of my level is making use of pieces from more than one theme and is meant to be traversed in a particular order.  There are some levels in Torchlight that are created in this manner, but not all of them.

I don’t have too much more to say about this section since it is so short, but below is a video of the crypt section in a fairly complete stage of development.  I have the cave section sketched out already, so that update should come fairly quickly despite it being much larger and more complicated.  Being more accustomed to the editor helps as well!