Level Editor Returns

Posted by MattVonFat on March 3, 2012 No comments

The game is still alive!

Other, more important, things have come up since the last post so I’ve not been able to spend a lot of time working on the game. The small amount that has been done mostly involves the level editor.

I had to rebuild it from scratch numerous times as how tiles and maps were connected to each other kept changing as things like scripting were added and as the way levels were saved and loaded changed. Now though the underlying stuff has all been worked out and the editor is close to being finished. The only major thing to do is an interface for linking the levels and maps together.

Once that has been done I’ll have a quick update of the game engine itself which, despite all the changes with the level editor, is still fit for purpose once I transfer some of the classes across. I’ll then probably create the tutorial level that I’ve been thinking about since I started the game and then put it out as a kind of demo to give an example of the game play.

I can’t make promises on the time this will take as I still have this other stuff going on which is more important and it’s taken me about 8 months to just get this post out! Hopefully though there’ll be more to talk about before November though!

Level Editor Update

Posted by MattVonFat on July 11, 2011 2 comments

Just finished adding prefabs to the level editor. ‘Just’ is the operative word, as in 5 minutes ago! The idea is that a worklog post counts as work towards the game so I don’t need to feel bad about stopping :D .

Prefabs are images that aren’t tiles which can be added to the maps. An example of one that I’m using in a test level is a picture of a tree. A tree would be complicated to draw using tiles so with prefabs a normal image can be used. The other benefit is that, once the scripting language has been done, the image can be modified in ways that tiles can’t, for example having the tree fall over.

These can now also be saved and loaded and the level editor is doing it fine without any strange bugs (touch wood) which I guess is the benefit of using xml as a storage format as it only required a small modification and didn’t affect the old format files.

Now that Wednesday isn’t going to be taken up with prefab work, hopefully a scripting language will start to manifest itself!

New Platform Game

Posted by MattVonFat on July 6, 2011 No comments

I recently came up with an idea for a new platform game while working on something else that was related to the subject of the game. I wont show my cards too early on this until I have some sort of demo that shows off the mechanics of it and I’ll probably wait until that sort of time to write about the idea I’m working on (this parts all on paper and in my mind so wont be interfering with the actual game) that lead to the game.

Anyway, I’ve started this blog to give me an easy way to post my progress, more as an encouragement to myself than anything else, and I hope I’ll be able to post quite regularly.

So to kick things off:

This is the level editor I’m working on. It has the basics down at the moment such as placing tiles and loading and saving levels. I’m also planning to add objects that aren’t actually tiles, a basic scripting language (well basic is the plan anyway) and a way to create simple in game cut scenes. I hope to be able to post some more updates late on Wednesday next week as I have that day off work and daytime telly isn’t as good as it used to be!