Level Editor
This project is an update to tilemap editor I made for Anataria. During my fall 2017 semester at Lawrence Technological University. At this time, I was revisiting old projects and found the outdated Anataria and tools that were developed with VB. They run poorly around 10-30fps so I tried to construct an updated editor that rendered the tilemap with the in game engine using MonoGame integrated with Windows Forms.
The new Level editor was developed using a Windows Forms template with Visual Studio 2017 in C#. The Windows Form class used a reference to the MonoGame libraries that come as an add-on for projects in Visual Studio 2017. The reference allowed me to create an instance of the MonoGame Library Game class and render the game through a picturebox control on the Windows Form. This allowed me the ease of developing a application with the built in drag and drop toolbox from a Windows Forms template while using the optimized content pipeline from the MonoGame Library to render and animate tiles for the editor in real time. The program was developed solely by myself.
A short video highlighting some of the capabilities of my custom level editor for 2D games is below:
Features
Common tiles like grass automatically place random similar tiles to break up uniformity and save time.
A fill and clear feature is available to quickly fill a layer with a specific type of tile or clear it out
Multiple layers are added so tiles with transparency can be layered over over ones
Map files are serialized binary objects so they can be used in any project regardless the tile palette imported so long as the same tile engine library is added to your project.
Space bar can be pressed when highlighting a specific cell to automatically apply the last data code or collision information provided to the previous tile.
Michael Hense