I’ve been working on the editor for some time now. And in fact have got moving platforms, and tile collisions, and basic platform physics working in the actual game part of the program. But right now I’m going to talk about the editor. It’s got map saving and loading (currently only one map can be saved or loaded). It’s got tile placement (if you look in the first screenshot below you will see a little green square and a purple one, these are tiles for the moment). You can scroll around the grid too. You can also erase tiles by right clicking anywhere.
Notice the “scroll down” button… It doesn’t do much right now other than highlight if hovering over it or shaded if you press the left mouse button. In any case I’m trying to figure out how to organize my tiles, and indeed about tile creation. I figure that you will be able to create tile chunks, which are composed of those 16×16 tiles, this way you can get kind of detailed and as long as the tiles are multiples of 16 then you can stack them up on top of each other. Let’s say a window is 64×32 pixels… that’s 4 tiles across 2 tiles down. Let’s say you want a flower in a pot on top of the window ledge. And the ledge itself is 64×16. which is 4 tiles across 1 down. and let’s say your flower pot with flower is 2 tiles high and 1 across (16×32). You want the flower pot to sit right on top of the ledge so you place it in the position starting with the bottom of the window but on top of the window ledge. Because these are all multiples of 16 the flower pot sits neatly on the ledge in front of the window. That was the purpose to these tiny tiles instead of big ones. You create a big one (ie the window) from individual tiles in an image (corners, frame, glass). So now I’m trying to think of how to organize the tile panel there on the sidebar. Do I just keep adding them making sure they’re spaced out the size of 1 tile. Do I create a specific size for the tile panel so it scrolls off screen as well. Do I create separate pages for each size of tile chunk. I have a lot to decide. To help me figure it out I created a little mock up. It’s not much different than the screen above except it has what would look like other sized tiles.
Well there you have it. Any idea folks?
Keith
Tags: editor, Hypno-Joe, platform game, scroller