In the funniest of ironies the advice that got me making progress by leaps and bounds this week came from me, as randomly re-tweeted by the 1GAM twitterbot.
#gamedev wisdom by @drakkheim: don't build a rocket ship when a bicycle will get you there. via #1GAM http://t.co/b9vQDB0HaU
— One Game A Month (@OneGameAMonth) March 21, 2014
And yet here I was wasting a month doing exactly that building a rocketship of an editor when all I just needed was to look for off the shelf parts.
One quick download of the Tiled editor (http://www.mapeditor.org/) and a quick peek at the raw file format reveals that it saves the files in XML.
A few hours later, and I have a functional loader which generates in-game rooms from maps saved from tiled.
Bulkify it and presto, all the levels are loaded automatically and the maze generator from week 1 now has a collection of rooms to choose from.
And so after a very long weekend, we’ve got a whole map being generated (ok so there’s still some significant glitches, but at least it’s loading it all from disk, generating a random maze and creating a bazillion prefabs from it)
