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Nice. Some suggestions.

A topic by Lone Spelunker created Jul 13, 2018 Views: 239 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+1)

Gave ZOME a test drive, and it's pretty slick and easy to use.  Omits a lot of the cruft that many editors like this bring.  I particularly like the way you accommodate resizing the map - very clever, clean, and intuitive.

It does feel like it needs a few things to be usable in a project, though.  Some of them ought to be easy to do, some might be more difficult:

*  A "fill" feature would be nice.

*  Like you said in your page, layers are kind of needed.

*  Some way to associate metadata with locations in the map.  Things like entrance locations, exits, npc's, etc.  The way Tiled handles it is that you can add dictionaries of key/value pairs as "objects" to location, which is really powerful, but if it were just associating numbers with tiles (like sticking a little "12" in the upper left corner of a tile when the number 12 is associated with it), that would be enough for a lot of purposes, since you could map those numbers to external things elsewhere.

*  Some way to associate metadata with the map itself would be nice, too.

*  The first tileset I imported was my tileset from Arkham After Midnight, which is a 512x512 tileset with 16x16 tiles.  It was far too small to work with the tile selector on the right.  You might consider letting the user zoom the tileset like you allow them to zoom the map.

*  I noticed that the tileset selector area was vertical, so I tried making a quick custom tileset that was 256x512, which was definitely more usable, but the UI cuts off the tileset view at about the 21st row instead of showing all of it, even though there is plenty of room.  (I'm guessing you're expecting only square tilesets?)  You might consider letting that entire right pane be filled with the tileset.

*  I'd like to see menu commands for things like save and load instead of just keyboard commands.

*  Undo/redo support would be nice.

Anyway, a nice editor.  I could see using it for quick one-offs, or games with simple tile needs.  I'd love to see it get developed a little further to add metadata and other amenities; I'd love to be able to use something like this for Arkham After Midnight and similar projects.

Developer

Hey! Thanks for the feedback :D

  • I think a Fill function will be added at some point, it should be relatively easy to implement!
  • Layers are kind of on the roadmap, but pretty far down the line, I'd like to have object placement first
  • Yeah, metadata should be doable with objects!
  • I may look into supporting zoom on the tiles panel, it might be kinda tough the way it's set up now
  • oof, the tileset is cutoff because I was planning on putting the object panel underneath, but I think maybe separating it into another tab or something would be best. I'll get rid of it for now to maximize that panel!
  • I'll look into menu commands as well - Dunno if it's possible with the framework I'm using
  • I've been thinking about how I can support Undo/Redo - a portion of the editor may have to be rewritten, but I think it'd be worth it.

Posting here is super fine, but if you'd like to post 

>  the tileset is cutoff because I was planning on putting the object panel underneath

I wondered if that was why that was happening.  If so, I think that's totally fine as long as you can zoom and pan inside the tileset window.  (Indeed, I suspect a lot of tilesets are small and need to be zoomed-in to be usable anyway, like 8x8 and 16x16 tilesets - you'd want to see them larger than that anyway for easy selection.)

>   I've been thinking about how I can support Undo/Redo

Since you've already got JSON saving/loading in place, I'll bet you could just bump off a JSON save to a stack of strings after every edit, and when you hit undo, pull that string from the stack and load it.  You're already got the hard part done - serializing the map data.

Looking forward to the next version!