Level Editor User Manual

Browser based level editor:

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 Controls

• Hold down the right mouse button or the ctrl key to drag the view around.
• The left mouse button draws the currently selected tile or, when the entity layer is selected, selects the entity under the cursor.
• Space toggles the tile selection or entity selection menu, depending on which layer is active.
• Backspace or del will delete the currently selected entity. C will clone it.
• Z and Y are undo and redo respectively.
• Press G to toggle the grid for BackgroundMaps
• Hold down shift and the left mouse button to select an area of your map or tile selection screen as your new "brush"

You can change these controls in your lib/leveleditor/config.js file.

Working with Layers

You will see that even in your empty map one layer is present: the entities layer. All entities for your level are placed here. This layer is always there; it cannot be deleted.

When you click on the + icon, a new layer will be created and selected. You can select layers by clicking on them in the menu, or pressing the corresponding number key on your keyboard.

The visibility of a layer can be toggled by clicking on the box in front of the layer's name, or by shift-pressing the corresponding number key. This visibility is only respected in the editor - it won't have any effect on your game.

You will see the Layer Settings menu for the selected layer (if it is not the entity layer). Here you can change the Name and the Tileset for this layer, as well as the Tilesize and the layer's width and height in tiles.

Be careful when changing the layer's Dimensions or Tilesize: there is no undo!

The Distance of a layer determines how fast this layer scrolls relative to your games screen position. With a distance of 1, the layer scrolls synchronous to the screen. With a distance of 2 the Map scrolls with half the speed, making it appear farther in the background. This is only useful for secondary background layers. For your main layer it should always be 1.

The Repeat checkbox specifies if this layer should be drawn as a repeating "background pattern". Again, this is useful for secondary background layers.

If Link with Collision is checked, all manipulations on this layer will also be made on the collision layer. That means that every time you draw a tile on this layer the same spot on the collision layer will be made solid (tile #1). Every time you delete a tile, it will be deleted from the collision layer as well.

You can create a collision layer like every other layer and tick the Is Collision Layer checkbox. It will automatically use the collision tileset and become the collision layer for this level. This also means, that this layer will not be drawn in your game.

Drawing

When a background or collision layer is selected, you can open the tile selection menu by pressing space. Select a tile by left clicking on it. After selecting a tile, simply left click to place it. Hold down shift and click+drag to select several tiles at once.

If you want to delete some tiles from the layer, press space and click anywhere outside the tile selection menu. This will select the "empty" tile. Again, just left click anywhere you want to place it.

All tile drawing operations can be undone or redone using Z or Y respectively.

Loading Your Entities

When the entities layer is selected, you can place an entity by pressing space and selecting it from the menu.

This menu will list all entities that were found in the lib/game/entities/ directory (this path can be changed in your lib/leveleditor/config.js). Entity names must be in a specific format in order to be loadable in Level Editor.

E.g. the file lib/game/entities/player.js must define an ig.Entity subclass with the name EntityPlayer. Dashes in the filename are used as an indicator for uppercase letters in the entity name. E.g. the file enemy-blob.js must define EntityEnemyBlob.

If there's a mismatch between the filename and the entity name, Level Editor will tell you so when starting.

Entities can have some special properties that will only be used in Level Editor. These properties all begin with _wm.