At first I want to show you two basic functions of the editor many seem to miss. Once you know how to use them, working with the editor will become a lot easier.

Snap grid:

Press "G" on your keyboard to activate the grid. It really helps with precise room/platform placement. With "+" and "-" you can adjust the size of the grid.


Duplicate props:

With "Ctrl+D" you can duplicate single props or a group of props.

Sometimes we don't want players to go to a certain location in our level.


Or we don't want texture glitches to occur in the distance (see screenshot).



What we need is an invisible wall.

Invisible walls are not found directly in the props tab, but we can place some biker (H) flags inside doors or on the ground and turn them by 180 degrees, as they are invisible on their back.



This technique is called "back-face culling". Game developers remove certain polygons of an objects mesh that are not seen ingame to increase the performance of the game. In this case we can use it to our advantage.

A big problem with huge levels is the visibility of distant objects as they will fade into the fog once we're far away.

If thats the case, we have to set the colour of the fog darker to increase the object's visiblity.



But we have to make sure that the fog colour matches the level background (unless we want a black sky).

The enemies in Paint the Town Red will only move and interact in or around rooms.

If we want our enemies to move on a platform without rooms we have to add an "invisible" room by placing it under or over the platform.



Keep in mind that the room has to match the platforms borders. In most cases the enemies will orientate themselves by the navmesh of the room.

There is a little trick to make enemies spawn once the fight begins.

We just have to place them under or over the navmesh.


They won't move or react to physics when they're in their animation state. But once we enter the fight, they will align themselves to the nearest navmesh plain.

Edit: Unfortunately, this trick isn't possible anymore as the enemy pathfinding was patched in an update.

There is a platform limit in the current version of the game. If we create a level that has a huge amount of platforms, we have have to manage them better.

One way to do so is by deleting other platforms with the same height/position/colour and replacing them with a single platform with multiple edges.


As an alternative we could also use the newly added props (the wooden pillars) instead of platforms, but the choice of the pillar's colour is restricted (light brown, dark brown, black).

Some props, if positioned correctly, can be used to create interesting special effects.

We can use them to create smoke out of nowhere by adding a pan with hot water in it and dragging it under a platform.


Or we can even add highlights to shiny objects.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for improving this list just let me know.