ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that in building the level editing tools for Wayward Souls, it was inspired by Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and Spelunky. The example is for a two-dimensional (2D) game, but many of these concepts could be applied to a three-dimensional (3D) game. Through trial and error, we created a highly functional handcrafted room editor. Every pixel in a map image represented a tile. Every colour represented a different kind of tile. Data from a layered PSD file would be run through a web-based parser. This processed all the graphic layers and converted them to tile data, which was stored in a SQLite database on our server. The level image files were layered so that different layers could be flipped on and off at will. The layer names served as scripting to determine the conditionals as to when and how often that layer's pixels could be drawn onto the map by the game.
