Built-in level editor

Tom, September 13 2006
When I first started making Blast Riders Devastro I thought I could create most of the data in external editors and by hand. I can draw the sprites in Photoshop, export to PNG, add some hand-written meta data. I can draw the levels on paper, then hand code them in some human readable text format. Easy.

Forget about it. It gets messy very quickly. Not that there's so much metadata for the sprites, but there are many sprites. Not that there's much stuff in a level, but there are many levels.

Now what? Can I use existing tools to solve that? Photoshop has a feature called Slices, I can use that to add collision boxes to the sprites. Save the HTML output, parse it, extract collision box info. Easy!

Forget about it. Been there, done that... and it actually kind of worked but as a long term solution it sucks. I ended up writing a custom sprite editor and a custom level editor. Is it worth it? Definitely! Level editing is a joy now, which is what it's supposed to be. Editing sprites is now, well, bearable.

Including the editors with the game as an official feature would require a bit more polish though and I guess only a few people would even try it out. Maybe for version 1.1
Before I started writing this I thought I might mention Quake3 and its magnificent editing tools to get to my point, so I dug up an old Quake3 map that I created a long time ago. It is called "Dog Day". Incidentally, it is very hot today.

Dog day. The map doesn't play very well but at the time I was really proud I could finish it at all.
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