GridMap
The Map Editor to End All Other Grid-Based Map Editors
Screenshot showing how complex the maps can be regarding things like doors per tile and room/area shapes.
As developed progressed with my Metroid project, I ran into a problem with designing the maps for the various levels that the player will be tasked with exploring; how would I even program these maps into the game? The solution I came up was fairly efficient, but it required a lot of code to account for not only the map tile itself, but the icons that could be placed on top of said tiles to indicate a hidden item, a save point, a door’s colour, and so on.
So, I decided that building a simple editor to create and export these maps into separate files that can be loaded during runtime for the current area the player is exploring would make the process much easier than having to create each tile within the actual game code itself.
The functionality of the editor is fairly robust. It can create tiles, update them when selected again to the newly selected tile/icon pair, removed with a right click. On top of that, the user can give the map a name for the region it represents, and the size of the grid used by the map can be altered to any values between 1 and 255 along each axis. On top of that, maps can be saved and loaded into unique “.gmp” files, so they can be placed into a given game’s files for use as map data within said game.
As development progresses, I hope to implement an undo/redo system for tile placements and updates, as well as the ability to add up to four doors per tile that each contain their own unique colours that the game using the map data can then use to denote the type of door it is to the player.
Source code can be found here: https://github.com/ChrisBrine99/MapEditor
