Make a level editor

Goals

I’ve made a passable tileset and level generator for my game. Now, I’m going to make a level editor.

In the future, I’ll probably use a bit of procedural generation, but I want the ability to custom make certain levels and some things within levels. That’s where the level editor comes in.

How am I going to do this?

I’m going to make a web portal with js/html/css that will allow anybody to make a grid and fill it with preset tiles. It will have a button that will download the level as a JSON when they’re done.

Eventually, I'd like to put…

Now that we have a basic foundation for the game. Let’s upgrade the aesthetics a little bit.

Goals

I now have the basic foundation required to start a little world-building. Today, I’m going to make a bunch of tiles before moving forward so that my game looks a little nicer.

Attempt number 1

I spent like 2 hours making some tiles, here is how it looks.

upgrade our grid generating system to be more stable, and accept more options.

Goals

There are several problems I’m going to address today.

My grid generator takes in a text file with a matrix of single-character strings.

Each of my levels is generated iteratively.

Both of these behaviors create some restraints on my creative process because there are only ~50 single characters I can use so this restricts my entire game to ~50 tiles. I’m confident the end game will have more than 50 tiles.

Secondly, the single character restraint combined with the iterative grid generation disallows me the easiest solution…

Travel from one level to the next

Goals

Today I want to make it so my character can enter a portal or in the DCSS way, “go downstairs” to the next level. Similarly, I want my character to be able to go back up the stairs so they can go back to the old level if they wish.

How am I going to do this?

There are some key things about DCSS that I want to get away from. For example, in DCSS, every floor has multiple stairs and “trap doors.” DCSS uses this as a sort of bottlenecking mechanic for the player. The player can “stair spam”…

Generate a few levels and slap an outer wall on em.

Goals

Let’s use what I’ve done so far to generate some basic levels to be used for further production.

How am I going to do this?

I’m at the point now where I have a way to make some stable levels that won’t cause any game-breaking crashes. My grid_manager can take in any text file and generate the level.

Now, I want there to be a ring of walls on the outside of whatever map I make, and I want there to be a super wall on the outer edge of that. …

prevent my character from walking through walls.

Goals

Prevent my character from walking through walls while maintaining diagonal movement.

How am I going to do this?

I’m not sure. I have a method in my head that I know will work but I doubt it is the most performant way. I’m also convinced that unity has decent grid-game support and probably has a better way to handle this.

However, since I have no idea what those are I’m just going to do what I know will work.

I want my grid_manager to handle my grid generation.

I want my master_manager to handle the “flow of the game.” So…

Make a system that will generate a grid of walls and floors from a text file.

Goals

Today I want to make it so my game can take in a floor plan in the way of a text file that looks like a matrix with tags like this :

Character movement and tracking camera

Goals

Today I’m going to try to get a character on the screen, have it clip to the grid I made on day one, and have it be able to move across my grid both orthogonally and diagonally.

Sprite

The first thing I’m going to do is make a sprite with gimp. Again, I’m going to start out as simple as possible to keep development moving.

I want my character to be easy to see for testing purposes so I’m going to pick a bright color.

And there we go :