Demolition, Inc.

Demolition, Inc.

54 ratings
Demolition Inc. Editor Manual
By christ and 2 collaborators
Learn how to make Levels in the Workshop Editor of Demolition Inc.
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
General
This guide gives a fairly in-depth explanation of how to create your own levels using the Demolition Inc level editor, starting with a small tutorial. There is also a video guide available, that shows a level being made:

When you have an idea for a level, first make tests to make sure that your idea is working and get a feeling for what is needed. Start rough and go step by step into detail. For example, if you want to have a car jump over a ramp, test how far a car can jump and how much space it needs in front of the ramp.
Once your gameplay is working you can start to put details into your level.

Latest Changes / Current Beta Features
Features added in build 76764:
fixed Problems with Placing and Rotating Objects in Editor.
fixed Parking Boy Mission.

Features added in build 76726:
Bug fixes.
Note! The Parking Boy Mission and the Parking Lot Box is not working!

Features added in build 76641:
Painting: hold mouse button to draw multiple objects.
Stacking: you stack now barrels, containers or other objects. Hold Ctrl to lock the cursor height when doing that!
Added Characters
White splash in category street sign decals. Nice for painting on the streets.
Container in category Street furniture.

Current beta branch status
There is no beta branch currently active.
Quick Start Tutorial
This is a quick overview how to build an easy level.
Let´s make a level with one building and a car!

  • Create a new level:
    From the main menu, select Workshop
    Click ‘Create a New Level’
    Click ‘Edit’
  • First draw some ground:
    Press Ground to select the Ground tool
    Choose ground-asphalt in the bottom-right of the screen
    Draw a big square in the black space in the center of your screen to paint a big patch of asphalt
  • Draw some pavement
    With the Ground tool, choose Pavement-Sidewalk
    Draw some smaller squares on your asphalt to make patches of pavement
  • Put a building on the pavement
    press Create to select the ‘Create’ tool
    Select the Buildings category
    Choose one of the buildings to place
    Move your cursor on top of the pavement where you want to place the building, and click.
  • Add a car
    Select the Create tool again
    Choose the Vehicles category
    Select Car
    Vehicles need an Entity to determine what behaviour they have. Choose carParking to create a car that will not sit parked in the level.
    Click where you want to place your car
    Choose the Select tool and click the car to select it.
    Choose the Move tool
    Now you can move your car by clicking the left mouse button. Rotate it with the Keys G/T or by holding the Right Mouse Button and dragging.
  • Optional: Cover the Building and the pavement with a Greenisland
    GreenIslands are used to tell the game which area of pavement should be ‘greened’ when all the buildings inside it are destroyed.
    Press Create / GreenIslands and choose Greenisland.
    Click to place the greenbox on your building
    Click the Select tool and select your greenisland
    Switch to the Scale Tool.
    Drag so that the box covers the building and the underlying pavement.
  • Add a car controller start item
    Press Setup. Here you can choose various parameters that control the mission
    Scroll down to find ‘Car Controllers’ and click it
    Change the Quantity to 1 (or more)
    Click Next
  • Rename your level
    Click Rename
    Type in a nice name
    Click Apply
  • Play your level!
    Hit Play
    Your level will load. You should be able to complete it by driving the car into the building! But maybe one car isn’t enough...
Create
In this menu you can choose characters that you want to add to the level. Some characters have special functions which can be used by choosing the correct entity. The Entity Menu is shown automatically after selecting a character.


Buildings
Buildings are the main target for the player: when every building is destroyed, the level is completed.
Don´t forget to put your buildings inside GreenIsland boxes if you want trees and grass to grow after they’re destroyed.

Building Addons
Most of the addons are for adding detail to the building roofs.
WARNING: Don´t forget to move these addons when you delete or move a building. When they stick inside buildings, they will damage them at gameplay start.

Explosives
Handle with care. Don´t smoke!

Vehicles
Car, Van and GasTruck are drivable vehicles. You can choose from two entities. Parking and OnPath. Parking means they are just standing around and wait to be destroyed or used. OnPath means they look for the nearest VehiclePath and they try to drive along it.

Vehicle Paths are used to define tracks for the vehicles.
  • The Big Marker marks the start of the path.
  • Add new Points to the path by pressing the Insert Curve Points button while using in the Move tool, or select an existing point and use the Paint tool.
  • When you want to delete a curve it can happen that some Curvepoints are still in the scene.
  • When adding Vehicles to a path make sure you use vehicles with the OnPath entity, you should also use the snap to path option in the move tool.
  • Vehicles will despawn when they reach the end of a path, and then respawn back at the beginning. They will also respawn once destroyed after all their debris has been collected.
  • You can make a circular path simply by placing the start and end points of the path at the same position. Cars will then drive continually around the path and never respawn.
WARNING: Make sure the Start and End of the path are free of obstacles. E.g. keep it away from tunnel walls!

The Digger is just moving its shovel when it is touched by debris or a car.
WARNING: You can´t find vehicle path curves you set? Check the visibility of your Layers

Advert Billboards
You can attach the billboards to the walls of buildings.
WARNING: Don´t forget to move these addons when you delete or move a building. When they stick inside buildings they will damage them at gameplay start.

Items
ItemBox stores items that the user can use when he breaks the box. You can choose which items are in the box in the Entity editor menu. Can be placed on top of buildings.

OilSplashForever: this oil will never disappear.

Sender / Receiver When a Sender is destroyed it sends a signal to all receivers with the same color. When a Receiver gets this signal any nearby cars or explosives are triggered: explosives will explode and cars will start driving forward.

Street Sign Decals
Use the arrows to give the player a hint where the car paths are, or where they can/should drive.

Street Decals
Use the Tire Track Decals to mark vehicle paths streets. Its always nice when the player has a hint when placing oilSplashes and Glue.

Pedestrians
Pedestrian has a number of entities you can choose from:
  • Pedestrian means the type of pedestrian is choosen randomly.
  • BusinessMan, ConstructionWorker, Cowboy are normal pedestrians
  • SpeedDemonMission is a Sidemission and gives the player x car controllers when he drives y seconds.

Small and Thin are walkable boxes. When you place a pedestrian inside one of these boxes they walk around in it. Make sure the boxes are not intersecting with buildings etc. The Pedestrian could cause unwanted damage to all things in their boxes.
You can scale the boxes with the Scale tool.
WARNING: You can´t find the pedestrians you set? They can be hidden via Layers.

GreenIslands
GreenIslands are dividing the city into destructable parts that get green when every building on this green island is destroyed.
With Create-GreenIslands-Greenislands you can create a green box that can be scaled around pavement ‘islands’. make sure the box is clearly wrapping around all buildings and pavement tiles that should belong to this Greenisland.
All trees that you create inside this box are only shown after the buildings inside the box are destroyed.
WARNING: You can´t find the GreenIslands you set? They can be hidden via Layers.

Platform / Canal / Background
The elements are part of the ground tiles. So they delete all underlieing ground tiles when they are placed. Make sure that you use this elements only outside of the level barriers. They have no correct collision geometry, so it would confuse the player if they exist in the playable area.
WARNING: these tiles are not moveable or rotatable
Stacking Objects
If you want to stack objects. It is sometimes irritating that the cursor is gliding along walls. To make sure your cursor is not jumping wildly around just hold the Ctrl Key while Painting or Moving Objects.
By holding Ctrl you can easily stack things!
Save , Save As, Rename
Save
Standard save. Save often!

Save As
Saves a copy of the level. Use Rename, when you only want another name.

Rename
Rename your level. Use Save As, if you want to make a copy.
Thumbnail, Publish
Thumbnail
Arrange the editor camera and click this button to make a new thumbnail for you level.
Alternatively you can also upload a manually made screenshot in the Steam Workshop.

Publish
Show the world your levels, and invite your friends to beat your highscores :)
Tools
Some of the tools have option buttons, that are shown on the right bottom corner, when a tool is active.

Select
Select characters. Then move or paint them.
When you hold shift, you can select multiple characters.
Multiselections can only be moved and deleted. Snap to Grid orients on the grid size of the last selected character.

Move (Rotate)
Move selected character with left mouse button, rotate them with the right mouse button.

Options:
Snap to Path Use this to align vehicles on their vehicle paths
Rot. Snap use this to snap the rotation to 90 45 or 1 degree.
Random Rotation randomly rotates objects. Some objects like trees, newspapers decals or barrels are already automatically randomly rotated.
Snap snaps the characters to an invisible grid. Each character has some predefined snapping.

Paint
You can duplicate the currently selected characters with one left mouse button click. For vehicle paths, this tool will instead add any new points to the selected path.
Hold the left mouse button to draw multiple objects automatically while moving the mouse.
See the Stacking Object chapter for understanding how to stack objects.
Ground
You can draw different types of ground tiles. The editor tries to be smart and chooses the right tiles.


Platform-Default and Platform-Tunnel should only be used for the background (outside of the level barriers)
Pavement-Sidewalk and Pavement-Pavement are getting green when placed inside a GreenIsland after all Buildings inside the Greenisland are destroyed.

Note: The ground can only be used inside the world borders. The world border is marked by a red line.

Scale
The scale tool is used for GreenIsland boxes and walkable boxes for pedestrians only.
Physics engines don’t like scaled objects so its not possible to scale other characters.

Layers
With layers you can hide and show different types of objects. Trees inside a Greenisland for example should only be shown, when all buildlings are destroyed. In the editor you can hide them over the layers, so that you can create buildings without being irritated by intersecting trees.
You could also hide away All and switch on the Pedestrians, to find Zombies that are hiding inside buildings.

Delete
You can delete selected characters.
You can´t delete Mission Elements!

Undo / Redo
Undo/Redo you changes.
Note that you have to click undo for each object, when you selected and moved multiple objects at once.
You can’t use Undo/Redo for ground elements.

Play
Save and play the level. You can return to cement from the level by pressing Esc and selecting ‘Return to cement,’ or using the ctrl+c shortcut.
Mission Elements
When you activate the Layers tool you can toggle the visibility Mission Elements.

Level Barriers
The four pyramids are showing the boundary of the playable area of the level.
You can move them around.
The peak of a pyramid should always point inside the playable area!

Mission Complete
... move and rotate that, so that a lot of cars running into it and no trees are standing in front of the camera.

Ufo
... move and rotate it for placing the start camera. Use this to point the eyes of the player to the start of your level.
Level Style
Vehicle Tracks
A car track should always have the width of 2 ground tiles. Use Create.StreetDecals.TireTracksDecal for marking the track of a street for the player.
The player can use it as a visual hint to place glue and oil even when no car is there.
Use street signs (Arrow Left/Right) to show traffic routes.

Background Elements
The skyline background buildings should always stay outside of the playable area,
To avoid confusing the player you should divide you destructable buildings and the background buildings by canals or platforms.

Setup a Mission
Here you can set the number of items, the player should start with.
You can also set the ranking score, that is needed for getting 2 or 3 stars.
Or the time limit.
Scoring
For each explosion the player gets paid in dollars.
When the player chains explosions the combocounter in the upper right corner is increasing from 1x to a max of 4x. This means that all points that are made are multiplied with this combocounter.
Building scores are calculated by multiplieing the number of ground tiles.
To get a good feeling for the scores, you have to play the game. Calculating the points without playing the level is too complex.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are shown on the bottom of the screen, when you hover over the buttons.
We have a asdw set for right handed and a some keys of the numpad for left handed players.
Backups
Make backups of your work by either copying the local folder or publishing them on Steam-Workshop (you can make them private or hidden in the Workshop if they are not finished).
Limitations / Known Bugs
Sometimes the Gamepad is not working. Have to restart the Engine.
FAQ
  • How to reset the Leaderboard for my level?
    You can't delete or reset a Leaderboard. Use 'Save as' and save your level under a new name. e.g. 'My Level V2'.
< >
3 Comments
Trajan Aug 25, 2014 @ 2:46pm 
cool
S A D O L - TC RS Aug 22, 2014 @ 6:50am 
mucho loco
76561198040362588 Dec 20, 2013 @ 3:18pm 
I am now holding a tenacious vibe on this game. Thank you for the guide.