Welcome back everyone. In this video, we will be creating a test map in which will test all the player moves and skills that we're about to create in this course. And I'm going to be doing that for a few reasons, even though we have in example map already created here for us. One reason I like to create my own map is because it's a little bit more simplistic and also, and this is the main reason for me anyways, if I come to in orthographic top view, the way our current level is set up is that our character is going to be moving from bottom to top. So when you're moving left and right in your actual game, if you were to be viewing that from a top view, you'd be moving from the bottom to the top along the y axis, as opposed to the x axis and to me that's really odd and I don't like it.

So we're gonna go ahead and fix that. That now and this is going to be actually pretty critical to all the other measurements and directions that we specify in the course going forward, so don't skip this step. Anyways, with that all out of the way, we're going to come under File and we're going to create a new level. We're going to choose default from this new level list. And we are not going to save our existing side scroller example map just say don't save. And here is our new untitled level.

For starters, we should probably saved this. Let's click the Save Current button up here. I'm going to come under our Metroidvania folder come under levels. And let's call this What shall we call this? Let's call it m v underscore m v for Metroidvania. Test map.

All right, next I'm going to simply delete out our floor mesh here and don't want it we're going to create our own. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to bring in some geometry. So select your geometry tab off to the left here, we're going to bring in a box brush. So go ahead and select that, bring it on in, and I do have some measurements and the location specified for this. Let's go x brush setting x of 10,000. Why of 1000 and z, how thick is this gonna be?

We're gonna say 100. For the location, we're going to say x of zero, z or y of zero and Z of 50. So essentially, I'm going to be viewing this all from this angle right here. And if I look at this from a top orthographic view, let me zoom way out, this is going to look a little bit nicer, we're actually going to be moving from left to right in a sensical manner. Okay, I'm also going to call this box brush, something other than box brush, I'm going to name it floor. And I would like to actually put some materials on this.

So let me select this top portion of the brush right up here. And you can simply do that by clicking on the top portion of the brush. And under the surface materials in the Details panel, I'm going to slot in rock, marble, polished. This is in your starter content pack. So it's gonna look kind of nice, very profession. Now.

Alright, next I'm going to create a back wall. So I'm going to bring in a another box brush here, left click. Again, this is we're on the geometry tab, box brush, left click and drag. I'm going to give this an X brush setting of 10,000 y of 1000 and a Z of 100. And for the location, I am going to say location x zero, y of negative 550 and a z location of 500. And I'm also going to rotate this 90 degrees in the x so it stands up like so.

In for our back wall here, I'm gonna select Like the wall. And let's give this a surface material of concrete. I like these m concrete tiles. And I'm going to make them a little bit bigger. So I'm going to set the scale for these with that wall selected to be two times the size in both the U n, the V direction. Let's click Apply.

And that's how that is going to look pretty nice. There is already a directional light actor in here. There was one when we created this level, that is this guy right here. Let's select him and it doesn't really matter where you place this actor in your level. This location is fine, but I do want to edit some things with it. I am going to set it to a z location of let's just go 00 and 500 even though it doesn't really matter where you place this Kind of like it at this center point right here, the rotation going to set x of zero y, negative 30 and the Z negative 45.

Gonna kind of have it coming in at this angle. The directional light actor basically specifies which direction your light source aka The sun is going to be pointing in which direction so it's going to be coming in from this angle, the intensity I am going to turn down so with this light actor directional light source selected, I'm going to change my intensity here to be one. Maybe I will fiddle with that more later but that is good for now. Next, I am going to adjust my player start actor This was also in here by default, but I want to say Some parameters for this player start actor z location, we're going to set this to be 142, which is actually not even going to be high enough, I'm just going to drag this up into the air, hit the end key, and then I'll smack it on down to the ground.

So 190 2.2 is what I want to set it that and again, if you don't have that, you're going to drag it up into the air, hit the end key, that's the one right next to the delete key, and that will snap it down on down to the ground. Some more settings I want to set here before we really get rolling here. I'm just gonna move this sphere reflection capture out of the way not gonna deal with that. I'm gonna jump over to my project settings. And I can find that here under Settings, Project Settings. It's gonna bring on this tab I want to Find my editor section right here, and I want to select my to do options.

A few things I want to set up in here under my layer snapping section. If I expand out this snap layers section and we're going to expand out all of these by clicking on these little triangles like so and they're kind of hard to click on. There we go. There we go. I do want to enable snap layers. We do want that checked my snap axis though.

We're going to change to be the y axis because we have flipped around the direction that we have our level laid out in. Also, I'm going to make it so that we've got our foreground here of 1500 our background is going to be an 900 in our default here is going to be zero. And it actually just switch this around. So foreground is 1500, then background is 900. default is zero. Now what this will do if I jump on over to our level here, he is going to snap objects that we bring into our level into our Y axis at a depth of zero. What do I mean by that?

Well, let's test this out. Jumping on over to my test map. I'm going to turn on my to the snap settings here, instead of snapping to the foreground here, which would give me a y depth of 1500. I'm going to set it to default which is going to give me a wide depth of zero. So let me set this to default. And I've got my snap settings here turned on.

So now if I was to bring in like a basic, let's bring in a basic cube Right, I'm trying to move it like forward and back, but it is just simply putting this on the exact same plane. Let me just select it hit the end key to move it down, bring in another cue, the end key to bring it down you can see that they are on the exact same plane, that y value of zero, that is being specified by default depth of y zero in our editor to the settings. Okay, so that one is good to know about gonna be super helpful for just kind of laying some stuff out here for testing purposes. Let me just delete these out. Next thing to know about here that we should check, make sure that you have saved your map here. Go ahead and save it and we are I'm saving this to my content Metroidvania levels folder.

We also want to set this as our default map when we open The editor now I actually did that between videos here. But if I jump to my project settings, there is a section called maps and modes. And in our maps and modes, Project Settings, there is an editor start up map. And this is where you can set which map the editor will open up to by default, when we bring in Unreal Engine, so MV test map, that map that we just created, and the testament, other things that you may want to know about. And you can also find this in your play settings in the editor preferences, not the project settings. Um, we can also access it from here.

I find that a lot of students get confused that when they click the play button, and they try to use a w a s and D keys to move around that they can't move right away. They need to click on the window to actually Remove their character. So how can you do that I currently have it set up where I do not need to click on my play window. Well, if you come underneath this little drop down arrow next to your play button here, there are some advanced settings that you can choose. And at the very top of your advanced settings here, we've got our editor preferences, level editor play, this game gets mouse control, have this checked if you do not want to click on your viewport to take control of your character. And I typically like to leave my place settings on not the selected viewport, but a new editor window so when I select this, I'm gonna jump in and play in a new editor window.

And I currently do not need to click on viewport in order to take control of my character. So handy trip our handy trick for you all there as well. Anyways guys That is gonna do it all for this video. Our test map is now complete. We will see you in the next one.