What do you use for level design?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

After dozens of hours with Ponytiled a few months ago, I ultimately failed to make it work for my needs. So if I want to make a point-and-click puzzle/adventure game, what would be my options?

  1. Arranging things in Photoshop and then copying their coordinates to the text editor doesn’t seem very productive.

  2. Trial and error works better in Corona than in other engines but sounds like a humorous way to spend my time.

  3. I saw requests for an official level design tool and some links by Corona staff to some “Composer” thing that is presumably in development since 2014…

  4. There’s a “Tile engine” mentioned in the Roadmap…?

Basically, any tips?

#2

#3 - We started building a designer tool, but it hit roadblocks and we discontinued it.  We currently don’t have plans to produce a level design tool.

#4 - We had hoped to have an official “tiled” engine, but I’m not sure where we are in producing it.  For now, I would recommend PonyTiled, MTE or Caleb’s Tile Engine.  They all are going to hit problems with Tiled 1.0’s change to use external image sets. You have to do some steps to make sure the tiles and images get embedded into the map.

There is also Level Director X - http://www.retrofitproductions.com/level-director-x/ which does a lot of level design for you.

Rob

#3

What do I use for level design?  I code 99% of my client work by hand or with my own editors.

That said, if you do use tiled I suggest using it as a placer, backed by your own custom code to render the maps.

While Tiled is good, it can’t be a WYSIWYG editor for Corona.  i.e. Corona supports many rich features that can’t be expressed directly in the editor.  

Note: I do wish that instead of having a single ‘type’ mechanism in Tiled, you could instead attach multiple types in some fashion.  This would go a long ways to making it easier to integrate with a Corona pipeline.

#4

#3 - We started building a designer tool, but it hit roadblocks and we discontinued it.  We currently don’t have plans to produce a level design tool.

#4 - We had hoped to have an official “tiled” engine, but I’m not sure where we are in producing it.  For now, I would recommend PonyTiled, MTE or Caleb’s Tile Engine.  They all are going to hit problems with Tiled 1.0’s change to use external image sets. You have to do some steps to make sure the tiles and images get embedded into the map.

There is also Level Director X - http://www.retrofitproductions.com/level-director-x/ which does a lot of level design for you.

Rob

#5

What do I use for level design?  I code 99% of my client work by hand or with my own editors.

That said, if you do use tiled I suggest using it as a placer, backed by your own custom code to render the maps.

While Tiled is good, it can’t be a WYSIWYG editor for Corona.  i.e. Corona supports many rich features that can’t be expressed directly in the editor.  

Note: I do wish that instead of having a single ‘type’ mechanism in Tiled, you could instead attach multiple types in some fashion.  This would go a long ways to making it easier to integrate with a Corona pipeline.