Second attempt at representing air ducts for Ludic Field, after the first realistic version failed hard, and this time I finally got something decent going.

It’s kind of fun because, once again, everything is built from SVG, so I had to do some specific 3D tricks to properly extrude the 2D drawings. This map connects underfloor and overhead airshafts, which makes it a nice addition for gameplay, but also a bit of a headache to implement.

Now the question is, which version feels clearer? The one shown in the video instantly reads as an airshaft, it looks expressive and cool with that bit of volume. But I also have another version, a flat one without any depth, that might actually be easier to read. Mixing 3D and 2D is always tricky. It’s a subtle balance that can quickly look off if not handled carefully.

Right now it’s still a small level, but on bigger ones things could get messy once everything starts crossing each other. Lots of edge cases I haven’t tested yet.

I’ll keep both versions for now and see how it goes. Still a few things to tweak on this map, but we’re getting closer.

The good part is, I had to add support for multiple maps along the way, with a simple map selector. So now the viewer can actually load external maps, which is pretty great. That work later shipped properly in Ludic Field v0.2.

Finally, that was the less exciting part, but I had to rewrite a big chunk of the code since it wasn’t really designed to be modular at first. Now the architecture is way more flexible and supports different modes like isometric, navigation, and more. I wrote more about that foundation work right after. So yeah, we’re in a much better place now.