Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating a level
Creating a game level is as simple as picking the tile
id
s we want and placing them into the 2D
grid of rows and columns. This can be done pretty easily by hand, but it is much easier to do with
a tile map editor. Some developers find that laying out tiles in a drawing tool or even the Flash
IDE to be a suitable method for creating level data. Others actually create a level editor in Flash
to create levels specific to the game they are creating. In our experience, we have come to really
like using a tool called Mappy for level creation (full details for downloading and using Mappy will
be given shortly). Unfortunately, there is no Mac OS version of Mappy. It can be used with
Parallels or VMWare software, but there is no native Mac OS version of the software. It will also
run using WINE in Linux and Mac OS X and is listed in the WINE software database as working
in Mac OS. Even if you don't have a Windows machine, you should be able to make use of
Mappy. There are some other good multiplatform level editors such as FLAN that you might want
to check out also.
Creating a level with Mappy
We will first create a unique set of image tiles and export those tiles as a PNG file. Next, we will
load those tiles into a map creation tool (Mappy) and use them to create a level screen for our
game. We will then export the data from Mappy that represents the level we have created. This
data will be used in AS3 to display build our game level.
For our game, we will use the following graphics. They have been cut from the Spritelib GPL files
and placed onto our own tile sheet.
Figure 6-1.
The entire set of tiles for No Tanks! (with tile ID numbers)
First of all, the name of this tile sheet is going to be
tanks_sheet.png
. It is stored in the
/assets
folder of our Flex SDK project. For the Flash IDE version, it will be embedded in our
.fla
library.
It is a 256
128 PNG file with a transparent background.
