Made lots of progress on the editor since last time. I also gave it a name…Troidly!
It currently supports the following features:
- Drawing scenes (These are shown as purple areas)
- Drag and drop of selected scene anywhere on the grid
- Drawing walkable tiles within a scene (These are currently all blue tiles). As described before, this allows for easily showing the high level layout of the scene’s tilemap so that you can see the walkable areas. It’s basically what every Metroidvania out there shows in their maps. Overall, this step is still optional and doesn’t add any functional value to the overall map, since it is the scene that is directly linked to the TMX map.
- Saving and Loading the overall “ScreenGraph” as JSON.
Even though this is coming along nicely, the UI part of it is still not very nice to look at, and probably never will be. And the different modes (“Create Scene”, “Select Scene”, “Create Tile”, “Create Scene Links”) are all switched by using function keys.
I recreated part of the beginning area of the Castlevania SOTN map as a test of what’s possible so far:
I still want to at least add the following features before moving on to the scene metadata editor portion of it:
- Creation of Scene Links to link 2 different scenes together by connecting their edges. This would be where doors or other scene transitions happen.
- Auto-tiling for the walkable areas (would make tiling these much quicker than just using the palette on the right)
- Generate empty TMX maps with a relevant collision grid for any scenes that don’t already have a TMX map assigned. This way it would be easy to test out the overall game layout by just using this editor. I would probably create an exporter that does this in a plugin-style, so that it could be extensible to other types of maps.