UI heavy game - how can I make levels efficiently?

Hey Everyone,

New to Corona and enjoying it so far, but I’ve got a question about scaling what I’ve been working on.

I’ve been working on a puzzle game where the main activity is connecting nodes in a lattice network. Since each level is a new lattice full of nodes, I end up having to do a lot of guess and check to get the nodes in unique arrangements for new levels. Since I intend to make many levels, this process is getting very tedious.

This sort of game seems tailor made for something like Xcode’s interface builder (since I can just drag around nodes until I get something aesthetically pleasing), but that’s an uninformed assumption. I believe Unity has something that helps with quick UI construction as well. Does Corona have any sort of thing like this?
A perusal through the forums turns up some older discussion on a potential UI builder release, as well as some chatter on Xcode that doesn’t seem relevant enough to what I’m doing. If Corona does not have a draggable UI method of any sort, does anyone have a suggestion for how I might make these node networks more efficiently/easily, assuming that each level is custom and not procedurally generated?
Thanks for your time! [import]uid: 86785 topic_id: 14727 reply_id: 314727[/import]

Hello, is your question specific to placement of on screen items/graphics?

If so there are several third party tools to make this easier, that can even export the coordinates to code.

SpriteDeck is one of these tools, Gumbo being another. They are just two of the possibilities however. [import]uid: 84637 topic_id: 14727 reply_id: 54618[/import]

Thank you for the suggestions. Seems to me that exporting the coordinates to the code makes the most sense. I’ll look into both of the tools you have suggested, but if you have one that is specifically convenient for exporting coordinates, I would appreciate the suggestion.

Thanks again,
Cook [import]uid: 86785 topic_id: 14727 reply_id: 54628[/import]