Level editor 101 (2/25)

So, it's been a while since the last update. Sorry about that, I found myself deep in the weeds of development and it took a little longer than expected to get out. But I've got a massive update for you guys this week, and it starts with the very first release of my level editor for patrons, available here. It's still in an extremely early state, but it's (hopefully) polished enough for people to play and start experimenting with level designs themselves. Additionally, starting today I plan to release a new version of one of my games at least once a month, exclusive to patrons. (more on that later).

So since this is the first release, I figure it's only fitting to go over all the features included in this level editor, starting with the panel for creating a new level:

Clicking "New" will open this panel, allowing you to name your level and set it's size, anywhere from being one single screen to 200 tiles wide or tall. Once you create a level (after naming it of course), you'll be able to edit right away. The editor itself uses a custom auto-tiler to build levels, so all you have to do is draw with the mouse and the editor will do all the heavy lifting making those tiles look correct. Additionally by pressing space, you'll be able to switch to drawing half tiles, and steep or shallow slopes. There's no dedicated object restricting how slopes are used, and just like with solid tiles the auto tiler is able to handle them with (mostly) no issues.

While editing a level, the layer panel can be seen on the right side of the screen. This panel can be used to add new types of tiles to your level, to be layered on top of or behind the main one. The vertical slider is used to switch between which layer you're currently working on, the arrows allow you to change which order they're layered, and the horizontal sliders allow you to recolor these layers however you see fit by messing with their HVS values.

Also new to the editor and completed just last week: Platforms! You're now able to add platforms to levels that can be entered from below, and just like with normal tiles, these also support slopes (though only shallow ones in this case). By default it'll automatically try to connect adjacent platforms, but pressing space will change it to always place flat platforms, or platforms sloped in a specific direction without forcing them to connect to adjacent ones.

At any point while designing your level, you can click Test to enter play mode and try it out for yourself. This will spawn Maya at the far left side of the screen, allowing you to actually play the level you made and get a feel for it before pressing escape to return to edit mode. And finally, you can save your level, as well as load any levels saved to your computer. The panel to load levels will show you a list of every level you have by name, as well as a button that will open the folder where these levels are saved. So not only can you save and load your own levels, you can also share levels with others and play them by sharing these files.

...And that's everything the level editor has to offer at the moment. It was a lot to cover as you can see, and I worked really hard to get everything working so that people can enjoy all these features. But at the same time, it's still missing a lot as well. There's a lot of basic things you'd expect from a program like this that aren't there, like an undo function. There's no feedback for when a level is saved, no warning if you're about to close your level without saving, and in general there's not any safeguards stopping users from losing or deleting a ton of work by accident. But most crucially, there's no way to actually place anything in a level other than these tiles yet. So you can't try out the ladders from the last update, can't add in any fat fruit or a goal to reach, heck you can't even change where Maya is spawned. All of these are planned, but I point it out to make it clear that this is still extremely early in development, and so I can't guarantee that levels made in this version of the editor will be compatible with future versions. But if you'd like to try it out anyway and be a part of the process of making it better, I would love to see what people come up with.

So with all of that said, now it's time to talk about future plans, as well as a bit on why I even made this level editor to begin with. My next big goal is to add in an object mode and allow people to work with everything the game has to offer. In the process I'll also work on all sorts of smaller improvements, in particular geared towards the feedback I get now that people can actually play the game for themselves.

Beyond that I also want to start creating levels of my own, that aren't bound by the limitations of my editor. Currently I've been focused on a lot of the dirty work of systems development, building a foundation for things to come that's hugely important but not particularly flashy or exciting. Soon though, I'd like to shift over to primarily making more content for my game, and for that I need to let people know that my game exists and is being worked on so that I have the support to keep working on it. I'm thinking that having a new demo of levels that people can play for free would be the perfect way to draw in new players, and the level editor will make creating these levels easier and more sustainable than it would've been otherwise.

In the long term, I'd like to be able to just add new stuff to my game on a weekly basis. New environments, new level objects, enemies, powerups and so on. Part of the struggle with this in the past has been that I just don't have that many ideas for content, at least not ones that I'm confident on. The main ideas I did feel confident about were those involving Maya herself, her moveset and powerups/transformations, which is why up until this point those powerups had been the focus of my development. But powerups alone don't make a game, and so going forward I intend to add a lot more content around Maya, and I'll be taking ideas from friends and patrons for what that content should look like. I'll be able to just drop these new ideas into the editor without needing to design new levels around them first, and I'm hoping that in the long run, this makes the process of coming up with and iterating ideas much faster than if I were doing it all on my own. It'll also hopefully be a good deal for patrons, since then you'd actually be regularly receiving new content (rather than just hearing about me creating new content). With some luck and the right inspiration, you might even be able to get your ideas into the game. But that's something to figure out later, since we're not quite there yet.

And I believe that's all I wanted to cover with this update. Sorry for the huge wall of text, it was a lot to go over and I didn't really have any more pictures to break it up. But I hope this makes up for me missing a week. I actually did have a build posted to my patreon discord last week, but I wasn't really happy with it and so I didn't feel comfortable making a public announcement yet. It doesn't matter how small my audience might be, I just don't like putting anything out when I know I can do better. I want to promise another update in the next 2 weeks, maybe then I'll have that object mode I mentioned before. But in general the editor has been a little unpredictable, and I'm not sure if it'll be ready by then. Whatever happens, I can at least promise I'll post another update on what I've been up to, and if two weeks is too long to wait I'm always active on my patreon discord as well. Thank you for reading up to this point, and until next time!

Also!
If you are a patron and have the game, here's that level I made for the demonstration if you want to open it yourself. Notice just how tiny the file size is, I was really proud of that lol