Just wanted to ask everyone about their thoughts on this matter. Maybe some of you had to handle something similar already.
Most of my platform engine is ready, and soon all I'll have left to program are the individual objects. This means that I should start adding some real content to my game right away, so that it starts looking better than a bunch of colored squares.
Some of you might remember that my level structure is quite complex: The level map is a 2-D array of screen indexes. Each "screen" is 256x256 pixels and is composed by four 128x128-pixel blocks. Each of these is composed by four 64x64-pixel blocks, which are composed by four 32x32-pixel blocks, which are composed by four 16x16-pixel metatiles. Kinda crazy, yes, but it's the only way I found to have really big levels with the amount of memory available, and it's all working pretty nice and fast.
It would be a pain to go manually through all those structures just to make a single screen, so I coded this little command line app that reads in multiple level maps (2-D arrays of screen indexes stored in text files) and the screens used by those levels (each in a numbered text file, containing the indexes of 256 metatiles arranged in a 16x16 grid), and outputs binary versions of all the maps and structures that I need, and reports back how many structures were used so that I can increase redundancy when approaching the limit.
So, the only things I have to define manually are the metatiles, the screen maps and the level map, a lot closer to how levels are usually designed. However, this still sounds like a pretty boring task, so I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions on making the process of designing levels less boring and more visual. Specially since I'll probably be needing help for this, so I must be able to offer people a somewhat comfortable way to do it.
Maybe there is a decent general-purpose level editor that is somewhat customizable, and I can modify my app to convert it's output into the format I need. I just don't have the time to develop a complex editor with a complex graphical interface right now, that's why I'm looking for an alternative.
EDIT: Yeah, I'm aware of this old post of mine. But I really don't have the time to code a full tool, so I figured it could be a good idea to partially use a generic one.
EDIT: It seems like I had this idea before... Guess I'll check that Open tUME again. Does anyone know of other generic editors? Preferably not for DOS (Linux doesn't help me much either)?
EDIT: Know what? I kinda like Tiled. It's simple and quick to figure out, it outputs the levels in a format that's easy enough to read and creating a new tileset is dead easy. I might just use that and change my app to convert the output into what I need. I'll give it a try sometime soon.
Most of my platform engine is ready, and soon all I'll have left to program are the individual objects. This means that I should start adding some real content to my game right away, so that it starts looking better than a bunch of colored squares.
Some of you might remember that my level structure is quite complex: The level map is a 2-D array of screen indexes. Each "screen" is 256x256 pixels and is composed by four 128x128-pixel blocks. Each of these is composed by four 64x64-pixel blocks, which are composed by four 32x32-pixel blocks, which are composed by four 16x16-pixel metatiles. Kinda crazy, yes, but it's the only way I found to have really big levels with the amount of memory available, and it's all working pretty nice and fast.
It would be a pain to go manually through all those structures just to make a single screen, so I coded this little command line app that reads in multiple level maps (2-D arrays of screen indexes stored in text files) and the screens used by those levels (each in a numbered text file, containing the indexes of 256 metatiles arranged in a 16x16 grid), and outputs binary versions of all the maps and structures that I need, and reports back how many structures were used so that I can increase redundancy when approaching the limit.
So, the only things I have to define manually are the metatiles, the screen maps and the level map, a lot closer to how levels are usually designed. However, this still sounds like a pretty boring task, so I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions on making the process of designing levels less boring and more visual. Specially since I'll probably be needing help for this, so I must be able to offer people a somewhat comfortable way to do it.
Maybe there is a decent general-purpose level editor that is somewhat customizable, and I can modify my app to convert it's output into the format I need. I just don't have the time to develop a complex editor with a complex graphical interface right now, that's why I'm looking for an alternative.
EDIT: Yeah, I'm aware of this old post of mine. But I really don't have the time to code a full tool, so I figured it could be a good idea to partially use a generic one.
EDIT: It seems like I had this idea before... Guess I'll check that Open tUME again. Does anyone know of other generic editors? Preferably not for DOS (Linux doesn't help me much either)?
EDIT: Know what? I kinda like Tiled. It's simple and quick to figure out, it outputs the levels in a format that's easy enough to read and creating a new tileset is dead easy. I might just use that and change my app to convert the output into what I need. I'll give it a try sometime soon.