These months are really flying by; the end of March is upon us.
I’m afraid it’s been a slow week. That’s not to say that no progress has been made, its just not entirely tangible.
This week I’ve started to focus on the level editor. This is something I have worked on in the past but it quickly became a mess of code that was incredibly difficult to maintain or expand. Having got this far with the game, I’m convinced that a simple level editor is necessary in order to produce the quantity of levels I’d like. Its not important that its pretty since it will only ever be used by myself.
What’s key to me is that I can quickly produce a level, play it, and iterate upon it. I also need to be able to move its place within the story as a whole. All of this will become more important once quests are implemented and need to be managed.
I still feel that a web-based level editor is best suited for the job. It gives me platform flexibility and is easier to quickly create complex interfaces. AngularJS recently popper up in a few conversations so I’ve been investigating that – its a Javascript framework that extends html, making it more powerful.
Additionally I’ve invested some time in beginning to write an API in Ruby. This will purely act as the interface for presenting and storing my data. So, calling `/levels` currently presents all of the levels in JSON format. I’m currently using an SQLite3 database in conjunction to actually store the data.
The idea here is that I build my javascript application separately from my API. This is cleaner and allows me to dictate the data at API level and program against this. I hope it will result in cleaner code that is easier to extend.
All of this is fairy early in development at the moment. My first task is to get it to the point where I can build a level (from tiles) and pass the data to my API.
Slightly contrary to what I had originally planned then but April’s focus will be the level editor.