The Serious Art of Designing Fun

This week's looking to be a washout in terms of my personal game project. I blame it all on the on-and-off-again cold that's driving me crazy. My physical health seems to be directly related to the number of hours of sleep I'm getting - so I'm planning to go on a sleep binge and, literally, sleep away my illness. In light of that, I'm going to take it easy and just post a development update on the game so far.

The current challenge facing my game development is finding a level editor. Can I develop my own level editor? Yes - but is it prudent to spend time rolling my own level editor as opposed to working on the actual game design itself? Absolutely not. I still remember the advice my project lead once gave me - work on what you're interested in, for everything else, there's the Internet.

OK, so that's not exactly what he said. However, the main gist of it is true. Building a game requires a programmer to delve into many different areas - sound, graphics, AI, infrastructure, and databases to name a few. In turn, each of these areas will have game-specific issues you'll need to resolve. Let's face it, not all problems are equally interesting - so why spend the time working on a problem that (a) does not cater to your strengths, (b) has probably been solved before and (c) that you're not interested in?

For me, the area of least interest are tools. Don't misunderstand - tools (and pipelines) are crucial towards the development and iteration on a game. It's just that I don't find tools and its problems of particular interest.

... which bring me back to my plight - the search for THE map editor. For the past week, I've been searching for a 2D map editor for Tanktics. The most popular ones so far (if you trust Google) seems to be Mappy and Tile Studio. Both of these are pretty good 2D tile editors with their own strengths and weaknesses. However, what they both lack is the ability to embed events/scripts tags directly into the map or to attach them to tiles. Mappy had the closest functionality in that it had the capability of attaching strings and/or user number tags to tiles. However, neither had the ability to display the tag information on the map directly.

So far, I've resorted to trolling through SourceForge and Google Code looking for Open Source projects that meets my needs, or which I can easily extend to meet my needs.

Hopefully, my game will have a map editor by the end of the week. Stay tuned for further updates on this.