Storing level creation data

Games
#1

Hey folks!

I’m looking for a better way to create, save and load the levels for my game. Currently, this is the information I need to create one level:

Code 
[1] = {
  map       = "map1",
  spawnData = {
    maxDensity = 100,
    time       = 3*60*1000000000,
    interval   = {
      delay     = 2000,
      variation = 1000,
    },

    enemies = {
      virus = {
        level  = 1,
        weight = 1
      },
      floatingVirus = {
        level  = 1,
        weight = 1
      },
      splitting = {
        level  = 1,
        weight = 1
      },
      tank = {
        level  = 1,
        weight = 1
      },
      runner = {
        level  = 1,
        weight = 1
      },
      teleporting = {
        level  = 1,
        weight = 1
      },
    },

The way I usually work around this is creating a google sheets and exporting to json, it is very friendly for non-coders, visual and easy to edit and work around, but also very limited and annoying for more complex data.

CleanShot 2020-12-18 at 17.00.20@2x
CleanShot 2020-12-18 at 17.00.20@2x1898×1688 217 KB

I guess I may have to use something like SQL, but I’m curious to see if there is any other way to approach this.

#2

I use Excel for config data and my workbook has many sheets with each being thousands of lines long and 80+ fields deep. It handles nested data too.

I use a macro to dump it out to JSON. Works just fine for me and so much easier to tweak values in Excel.

#3

Do you use the same single macro for all of them, or do you create a new one for every kind of sheet you have?

Because my main problem is actually nested data, the current macro I use just recognizes the first row as the key and everything below as it’s content.