Goblin game editor pre-alpha: second screenshot
I’m probably boring the world here, but I figured I’d follow up on the last post to show some progress on my editor. It’s still really ugly, and this isn’t anything more than a throwaway map scribble, but at least I can say that it’s running and I have conquered the Flex issues I ran into. So there. 
(The magenta is transparent in the game engine.)
The editor also has undo. It’s hard to live without, so I implemented it now instead of later. It also saves maps as XML, which I will usually embed into the SWF, but doesn’t have to be there. The asset manager can handle either case, which makes life easier for test phases when you are changing the maps a lot.
I hope to get some “real” test maps put together and get right to testing things by this weekend. All depends on other demands on my time, of course.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:47 am
That’s looking pretty cool! I’m glad that you found your solution from your past issues with Flex. Hopefully you won’t come across any other issues with it, but I’m afraid that’s like saying that you won’t find a mess in a busy kitchen; it simply comes with the territory.
December 5th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Jesus, you are right. Making a mess is the nature of the work.
And although I still find Flex tedious, when it finally comes together, it’s a really good feeling.
And the tool’s not half bad now. At this point it’s still very crude, but I am only building enough to finish my immediate project, then over time I will refine it more and expand features. (That’s also a disclaimer that the code is “production” code–ie, quite messy. Ah, there again with making messes.)
All the tile and layer manipulation stuff is in place, and I can load and save maps and run around. Next comes the entity system, which actually doesn’t exist in the core engine yet. Looks like that’s the next thing to implement, but it also means introducing some gameplay stuff, like triggers!
Oh I can’t wait to have some triggers to set up some simple but flexible game logic. Best of all, they’re easy to use and require no extra code. It’ll all be in the data. One of my old games, Little Gods, used a trigger system like this to very nice effect. But I think this version is actually much more powerful.
Once things slow down (ie, after this is out the door in less than a month), I plan to write up some info about how I did some of the Flex stuff, plus whatever you, my dear readers, want to know. Don’t be shy!
So far this blog is mostly about me whining at Flex, but that’s not the primary purpose!