Recently I started helping design and create levels for my favorite clone of the hit 2000s game "Fantastic Contraption". In Fantastic Contraption (FC), you only have a few elements to create amazing designs in order to get the target (usually a ball or weirdly shaped block) into the goal area. It's a fun brain teaser and just a neat game to casually play.
Grejsimojs was created by Swedish developer Joakim Wiborn and is a spiritual successor/amazingly faithful homage to Fantastic Contraption. The game is available on both the App Store and the Google Play Store and I've enjoyed playing it so much. It is so surreal to be able to work on it.
My first hurdle when starting was that I needed a way to see what level designs had already been made. I could flip through the game on my phone, but there was no way to see them all at a glance. I needed a collage I could keep up on one screen to see everything easily.
To start, I opened up the game in Unity, then opened each level and took a screenshot. I could have cropped it using the Windows+Shift+S hotkey, but I wanted it to be more exact and not take forever; since there are 50 levels. Once I had all the screenshots, I wrote a quick Python script to take all the images, crop them a certain way, then add them to a collage based on some math. All I do is input the size of a picture and it figures out how far to space them apart. I also have a "resize" variable where I can divide the dimensions by a given factor in order to make the resulting collage bigger or smaller if needed.
All in all, it was a fun and quick project that's helped me out a lot when working on new levels and making sure the new ones feel fresh.