Platformation

Hi guys,

I'm working on a 2D platform game in my spare time that I hope to sell someday, although it will take some inspiration from Sonic among other games it isn't Sonic related.

As part of developing the game I needed a level editor so I could throw stuff together for testing. While the editor is no-where near finished (or ready for use - you can't even save yet!) I've open sourced it under the LGPL and made the code available on launchpad: http://launchpad.net/platformation

I intend to write a exporter plugin API so that people can use it for the own games (e.g. Sonic fangames - hence my post here )

Here are the features:

1. Load tiles from a directory of images (e.g. png)
2. Edit the solid areas of tiles [1] these areas are saved to an XML file alongside the tile image
3. Add/delete layers (can't yet rename, move them, or toggle them, activating is flakey)
4. Add/delete instances of tiles

It's written in C++ with OpenGL and Gtk and developed on Ubuntu. I will port it to Windows when I have a chance.

Anyway, if anyone is interested the code is there, I'm happy to accept feature requests/patches/feedback. I've got a basic set of features I need to finish before I can continue with my game, so there should be a lot of progress over the next few weeks and then it'll calm down as I move onto the game itself. Again, it's REALLY EARLY in development, I've only been working on it over a month or so just an hour or two here and there.

Hopefully it is useful for someone.

Luke.

P.S. Is there a Sonic engine out there that uses a documented file format for the levels? That way I could knock together an example level exporter, just a thought.

P.P.S: Screenshot:



[1] The inspiration for this came from a YouTube video I saw once, which I think was a development version of Sonic Maker, I'm not totally sure I couldn't find the video when I went to code it. It seemed like a simple way to do things, so if the developer is on here - thanks for the inspiration!

 

Heh, no it's not competition for Sonic Maker, as I said it's not directly for Sonic games I just used GHZ tiles for testing as that's what I had. I haven't actually looked at Sonic Maker (aside from a couple of recent videos) is it just for ROM hacks or for standalone fangames? If it's the latter does it have its own file format? Honestly, any similarity (aside from marking out the solidity of a tile with triangles and boxes) is purely coincidental, most of my inspiration is coming from Tiled which is what I attempted to use originally for my game but it wasn't a good fit.

It is being developed specifically for one non-Sonic game (well, I've got an idea for two, but I can only do one at a time ), but I'd like it to be more flexible than that (hence posting here for some feedback). I'd like to (for example) write exporters for other platform games like SuperTux. That's why the tiles can overlap and aren't required to be a specific size or anything like that, then it's entirely down to the exporter to format everything for the game.

"Platformation" is the best name I could come up with Platform-Formation

I'll try and get it usable ASAP and packaged for people to test.