Editing Levels


I'm going to keep this short, because exhausted... But two big things today.

First, got "algorithmic buildings" working. Basically, the idea is, instead of just having a big building sprite (100x400) and stamping it around, I split it up into multiple sprites and "assemble" a different building every time. The sprite has four floors, conveniently arranged at 100 pixel intervals. The first sprite (frame 0) is special, it's the "roof" and only applied to the top of the building. Everything else is shuffled around to create unique(ish) buildings. 

I may drop the floor height to 50 or 75 pixels so I can squeeze more more in, but that will require new art... 

Second big thing -- a level editor!

I've always wanted to be able to do a level editor. This one is very crude, and there are a few big questions I have to settle first. But! You can switch into the editing mode, which is handled completely by the E-S -- no special mode in the engine, unlike the help display (which I want to change to do this way instead). It drops a grid down and provides a cursor (also an entity!) that you can drive around with the arrow keys. 

An interesting thing I'm doing with the keys -- I extended the "hide" semantic to the key bindings so that if hide is set, they won't be considered. So when you hit the edit key, the key-edit handler "hide"s the existing key-bindings and rebinds new ones for level editing.

I also added some functionality so that when you move the cursor over an entity, it highlights it so you can see what you're touching. You can delete the entity at the cursor, clear everything or add new entities using the number keys 1-4. 

Of course, the joke here is that this game doesn't really do "levels" per se -- it has "phrases", which it chooses from the create the terrain. The idea with the editor is that you can define a phrase and save it, then it can be dumped out for a data file or whatever. Have to finish figuring that part out.

Files

kiplkat-html5.zip Play in browser
Version 4 6 days ago

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