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Inside the Kickshatter Level Designer

2026-08-25

The Kickshatter Level Designer is the browser workspace used to prepare, inspect, and hand off football-breaker content for KICKSHATTER: Break the Line. It is a production tool, not the player-facing game lobby: its job is to make a level pattern, its art sources, and its story material easy to review from one place.

It has three connected sections:

  • Level Designer for building a playable layout.
  • Asset Manager for browsing published Unity artwork and retained review material.
  • Story Board for reading the approved story panels in sequence.

Level Designer: a compact layout handoff

The main designer presents a responsive 420 × 912 phone preview with a 9 × 9 placement grid. A designer can select or drag one of seven gameplay blocks—Glass, Crate, Steel, Bomb, Crest, Keeper, and Bumper—into an empty cell, reposition a placed item, undo a change, delete a selection, or reset the grid.

The tool also keeps the game-data handoff deliberately small. A pattern has a key and nine serialized rows; import and export use the exact JSON shape below. Difficulty, par, and shots are available as handoff notes without changing that core pattern contract.

{
  "key": "owner_candidate",
  "rows": [
    ".........",
    "....b....",
    ".........",
    ".........",
    ".........",
    ".........",
    ".........",
    ".........",
    "........."
  ]
}

That narrow format is intentional: it lets a proposed challenge move from a visual layout to the game without inventing a separate editor-only data model.

Asset Manager: artwork in its source hierarchy

The Asset Manager keeps the published Unity PNGs in the same category and version structure used by the project: player motion, balls, obstacles, interactions, effects, pitch and goal art, trophies, and interface references. Fast WebP previews make the library usable on both desktop and mobile; each card opens its full-size source image.

This hierarchy matters for review. A name such as UI/CupRouteV1 or Props/Balls/ThroughV5 says both what an image is for and which approved iteration it belongs to, instead of relying on a detached exported filename. Existing published images and verification videos are retained, so a newer revision can be compared without silently replacing the earlier evidence.

Story Board: narrative material stays separate

The Story Board presents the approved panels for Chapter 01 · The Stone Goal in reading order: a player builds a practice space and keeps training through wind, rain, and mud. It also makes an important review boundary visible: the multi-panel final cut and unapproved animation are not presented as finished deliverables.

Together, these three sections make a simple loop: draft a level pattern, check the available art, and review its narrative context. The resulting game screens still need their own product review; the Level Designer is the shared place to inspect the underlying production material before that handoff.

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