Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Flash and Game development.

All big game industries use game editors to design the levels of their games. Just think about games like Unreal Tournament 3… its maps are designed with a level editor. It would be impossible to design such accurate maps just inserting array values or XML tags or whatsoever.

We aren’t creating games like UT3, but even games with much simpler level design like Tileball needed a level editor to design the tracks.

I used a prototype made by OutsideOfSociety… and if you don’t know this name… it’s the guy that inspired Tony Pa‘s tutorials.

Unfortunately, OOS is not active for a long time, and I am afraid he won’t come back more than a couple of times in a year

So I decided to continue his project about Flash tile game editors.

Don’t let the name confuse you… with a tile map editor you can design a lot more than platform levels… as I said, Tileball was designed with an editor, and with the same editor you can design, for example, Bloons levels, or some tile-based Nitrome games, and so on.

The editor provided by OOS is very poor, but it’s a good start to design a complete one, with all features a modern editor must have.

This is the to-do list I plan to… ehm… do.

– Saving in progress levels in your hard disk
– Loading levels from your hard disk
– Exporting levels both as array and as XML files
– Creating virtually infinite maps with zoom and pan
– Managing virtually an infinite number of tiles

I’ll start coding it very soon. Do you have any other idea about the features the editor should have?