Question - Making a level editor in GMS2 vs creating levels individually

[EpicMcDude]

This thought came up after listening to a podcast with Tom Francis (creator of Gunpoint, Heat Signature) where he explains that he wanted to have a level editor because Gunpoint was short on levels, this negative would be balanced by the positive of having a level editor.
So he made the level editor and after trying it out he regretted not having done this sooner as it was easier to make levels with the level editor than to make them in GMS2 as you normally would with the rooms.
While making my own game I came to the same exact realization - that I don't actually have that many levels planned and that a level editor would be awesome for me and for everyone else.

Unlike Tom, I'm still able to create a level editor to make the rest of my levels as I don't have that many made yet. So my question is, is it worth it? Did it improve your workflow/dev time making the rest of your game like this?

Thanks!

 

[ophelius]

It really depends on the time it'll save you in the end. It'll take a while to design the editor, so if your game is very large and GM's editor is very limiting to you, then it might be a good idea.
I find GM's editor easy to use and it has everything I need if you know your way around it.
Other ideas are to use generic map editors like Tiled which has a lot of features and can save the data in many formats: https://www.mapeditor.org/

 

[Khao]

Kinda confused. If you don't plan to have many levels, isn't a level editor kind of a waste of time for your project? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to build a complex tool if you're not gonna have many chances to use it. Unless your levels are super time-consuming to create and you know there's ways to automate and/or streamline the process that is.

My game is not going to have many levels for one, and they're all gonna be pretty much a static background with platforms and maybe a few unique features that are gonna need their own specific code anyway. Having a level editor is really not gonna save me a lot of work.

For larger projects with tons of levels that need some super specific method of creation, I can see how it could become a must. Like, if you have vertex-based colissions or some like that and they're not easy to setup in the room editor. It really depends on how long it takes you to create a level vs how long it takes you to create an editor, and how much time it's gonna shave off the creation of those levels.

But for most projects I think the room editor is more than enough.

 

[EpicMcDude]

It really depends on the time it'll save you in the end. It'll take a while to design the editor, so if your game is very large and GM's editor is very limiting to you, then it might be a good idea.
I find GM's editor easy to use and it has everything I need if you know your way around it.
Other ideas are to use generic map editors like Tiled which has a lot of features and can save the data in many formats: https://www.mapeditor.org/

Kinda confused. If you don't plan to have many levels, isn't a level editor kind of a waste of time for your project? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to build a complex tool if you're not gonna have many chances to use it. Unless your levels are super time-consuming to create and you know there's ways to automate and/or streamline the process that is.

My game is not going to have many levels for one, and they're all gonna be pretty much a static background with platforms and maybe a few unique features that are gonna need their own specific code anyway. Having a level editor is really not gonna save me a lot of work.

For larger projects with tons of levels that need some super specific method of creation, I can see how it could become a must. Like, if you have vertex-based colissions or some **** like that and they're not easy to setup in the room editor. It really depends on how long it takes you to create a level vs how long it takes you to create an editor, and how much time it's gonna shave off the creation of those levels.

But for most projects I think the room editor is more than enough.

I do think GMS2 room editor is great, it's really easy to use and intuitive, it was just a thought that came to my head.
Regarding the levels, sorry if I didn't express myself correctly, I do want to have as many levels as possible, it's just that currently, I don't have many levels planned at the moment because I'm not sure where to take the game from where it is now, but it'll come to me.

Thanks for the replies, definitely not worth doing a level editor as my level creation workflow is pretty much like yours Khao.

 

[Niels]

This thought came up after listening to a podcast with Tom Francis (creator of Gunpoint, Heat Signature) where he explains that he wanted to have a level editor because Gunpoint was short on levels, this negative would be balanced by the positive of having a level editor.
So he made the level editor and after trying it out he regretted not having done this sooner as it was easier to make levels with the level editor than to make them in GMS2 as you normally would with the rooms.
While making my own game I came to the same exact realization - that I don't actually have that many levels planned and that a level editor would be awesome for me and for everyone else.

Unlike Tom, I'm still able to create a level editor to make the rest of my levels as I don't have that many made yet. So my question is, is it worth it? Did it improve your workflow/dev time making the rest of your game like this?

Thanks!

Gunpoint was made in gamemaker1.4 (or older), and that version of the engine had a horrible room editor. Gms2's roomeditor is much better than the old one.

 

[Psycho_666]

So my question is, is it worth it? Did it improve your workflow/dev time making the rest of your game like this?

Well, here's the thing: even if this doesn't improve your Dev speed or whatever, it will massively and I mean massively increase the appeal of the game and it's longevity. It's a huge selling point.
And yes, depending on how complex your levels are, an actual level editor may be very helpful.
AFAIK that is exactly the way some studios do it. They spend time creating tools and then they use those tools to create the game. The level editor is just a tool in your hands and huge selling point for the final product. So you can only won by having it.

 

[dannyjenn]

Kinda confused. If you don't plan to have many levels, isn't a level editor kind of a waste of time for your project? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to build a complex tool if you're not gonna have many chances to use it. Unless your levels are super time-consuming to create and you know there's ways to automate and/or streamline the process that is.

I think the idea is, include the level editor in the actual game so that the players can make their own levels.

While I personally don't find it very fun to make my own levels, I am aware that many games have such level editors. And the Mario Maker series, which seems to be very popular, is essentially a level editor. So it seems at least some people would enjoy it.

Gms2's roomeditor is much better than the old one.

Well I haven't used GMS1.4 much, but I actually preferred the older pre-GMS room editor over the GMS2 room editor. Maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's because I never bothered to relearn it after I transitioned from GM7 to GMS2. But in either case, I find the new room editor harder to work with. At least for the kinds of games I make. I kind of wish they had kept the depth-based system rather than switch to a layer-based system. And I kind of wish you could add instances to the room through the room editor, rather than dragging them in from the resource tree (which just feels weird).

 

[RefresherTowel]

So I've been in the process of creating a puzzle editor for my Spaceslingers game over the past few weeks. The only reason I've actually devoted any time at all to building a level editor is that the functionality of GMS's room editor did not meet my minimum requirements for level creation. To give just a little bit of backstory: it's a physics puzzle game where the path you set for a ship decides whether you complete a puzzle or not. Unexpected interactions between things are expected (so, really, expected interactions, I guess). I need to see these interactions AS I'm designing the level. Without them, it's impossible to design puzzles. Therefore I need a better framework than the basic GMS Room Editor.

If this was not the case, I would be pretty hesitant in creating a new level editor. It really depends on the scope and the time saved. In my case, designing puzzles is borderline impossible without a custom editor, but lets say I'm designing an RPG. I would need to see some significant speed-up in level creation in order to spend the required time developing an editor. I would also be counting how many levels I'm going to be creating:

The basic idea is something like this: Let's say I'm building a 20 level world. I have a prototype level editor that I built in a day and to fully extend it might take three weeks. The level editor seems about 20% more efficient than creating the same stuff via code. I'm spending about a week per level when designing in code. If I don't design the full editor, I take 140 days (or 20 weeks) designing levels. If I do develop the full editor, I eventually spend (including time creating the editor) about 133 days (or 19 weeks) creating levels. In this scenario, I definitely do NOT build the editor. My estimate of 3 weeks to build it might be off. The amount of time saved might be off. Both of these could add up easily to overpower the single week I am saving by creating it and ultimately cost MORE time overall to implement the editor than I would've spent literally ignoring it. There's also the fact that during the creation of the editor, I'm constantly diverting mental power from the actual game and mechanics towards the basic building of the editor.

Basically: scope, look at percentage guesses and focus on what is the best outcome.

Having said all that, if you're totally a hobbyist and don't care about anything other than making some cool , 100% build a level editor. It will teach you a bunch of about programming processes, it'll let you develop skills that might have been uncared for in the past (Hello window based programming) and it'll be a fun and cool exercise to develop those sweet brain muscles.

 

[Yal]

The main reason to build a level editor is when your game needs something unique that GM's room editor doesn't offer... live previews of some complicated phenomenon (such as RefresherTowel's puzzles), automatic tools for some system (e.g. autocompleting buildings, generating random tiles on-demand for more variety, etc), or your game being proper 3D.

From my experiences, level editors are pretty easy to make implementation-wise (just creating the in-game objects works fine in a lot of games, with stand-ins for things like timed bombs and the player character; then just save a list of x,y,object tuples), with the exception of the user interface. If your level editor is a pain to work with, you're going to expend work to lose time and energy, but getting the interface to work with you and feel fun to use requires about as much test playing and fine-tuning (and bug testing!) as the game itself.

 

[Evan Waters]

Yeah making a good editor interface is a separate programming/design challenge all its own. (Of course in my own case I've got to do a lot of work with menus and GUI setup, if you're more experienced with that it's maybe not as hard.)

Plus even though I've hashed out the core mechanics of my game I know there's a lot of stuff I'll be adjusting as I go, like enemy behaviors.