Creating a level editor

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi all,

I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction.  I want to make a level editor to go with a game I am developing, it is not really grid based, although it could be.  Basically the user drags elements onto the screen to complete different puzzles (similar to puzzle ball). As it is level based going up in difficulty, I don’t want to randomize it. 

Currently I am placing the parts programmatically, but after watching ‘Monster Need Coins’ hangouts (which is simply awesome - thanks Ed and the team) I think that an editor would be the way to go.  

As it is my elements are placed via specific x and y locations;

  • can this be done via a level editor and if so can someone point me in the right direction?  
  • or would I be better to go to a grid system? This seems like it would be easier, but slightly cut down on flexibility which could impact on getting levels just the ‘right’ level of difficulty.

Thanks for your help,

Craig

#2

Craig,

  1. Thanks for the kudos.

  2. I’m currently re-exploring Tiled (as per Sergey’s suggestion) and finding it quite useful.

I’m currently prototyping a game with it to work out the kinks of editing levels and such.  So far, I’ve determined the following:

  • You can place on grids or on arbitrary positions.
  • You can have multiple layers to lay out both tiling backgrounds, overlays, etc. AND object layers for playing element in the scene.
  • You can export all this into a lua module which then contains an easy to parse set of tables describing the layers, content, and settings.
  • You can assign arbitrary flags and values to ‘objects’ and layers in order to later extract them with your scripts and do ‘something’.  i.e. You can set values and make layout decisions on those values later.

All in all this is shaping up to be a powerful and relatively easy to use part of my own development pipeline.  If I stick with it, I’ll certainly do a couple of hangouts on it to get folks started.  All thanks to Sergey Lerg.  

There is also a great tiled loader/engine out there: https://github.com/GymbylCoding/Dusk-Engine  However, I suggest digging into the output on your own first.  Again, I’ll probably cover Tiled in a future show(s).

#3

Craig,

  1. Thanks for the kudos.

  2. I’m currently re-exploring Tiled (as per Sergey’s suggestion) and finding it quite useful.

I’m currently prototyping a game with it to work out the kinks of editing levels and such.  So far, I’ve determined the following:

  • You can place on grids or on arbitrary positions.
  • You can have multiple layers to lay out both tiling backgrounds, overlays, etc. AND object layers for playing element in the scene.
  • You can export all this into a lua module which then contains an easy to parse set of tables describing the layers, content, and settings.
  • You can assign arbitrary flags and values to ‘objects’ and layers in order to later extract them with your scripts and do ‘something’.  i.e. You can set values and make layout decisions on those values later.

All in all this is shaping up to be a powerful and relatively easy to use part of my own development pipeline.  If I stick with it, I’ll certainly do a couple of hangouts on it to get folks started.  All thanks to Sergey Lerg.  

There is also a great tiled loader/engine out there: https://github.com/GymbylCoding/Dusk-Engine  However, I suggest digging into the output on your own first.  Again, I’ll probably cover Tiled in a future show(s).