noel
@noel

I've been very slowly creating a small game-making tool, somewhere between PICO-8 and what Game Maker was to me circa 2006. I'm not taking it super seriously and only working on it when inspired, but I think it could be cool. I sort of see it as like Love2D but with a small 2D level and object editor built in.

I've gotten a bit stuck on where to draw the line on what it does. I liked the idea of it being self-contained, including sprites, tilesets, sounds, fonts, and so on. But to make that idea work, it balloons into a lot of different editors. Suddenly it needs a little pixel art editor, and I start asking myself why I'm making a pixel art editor at all when there are extremely good tools readily available, like Aseprite. So currently I've just kind of left it, as is, for the past few months.

I'm still undecided on what to do with it. I could create a small pixel art editor that just does the job, like PICO-8's, and make it easy to load in Aseprite files and the like. Or I could just remove that idea entirely and focus on it as more of just a level and object editor, and assets are more of a "figure it out yourself". I do really like the self-contained direction though, and the benefits that brings.

But yeah, I dunno! We'll see.


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in reply to @noel's post:

Maybe allowing you to import external assets like in Game Maker will be easier for everybody? I've experimented a bit with PICO-8 but it might be too limited for me. Perhaps a little bit more freedom will be good for larger games. And of course, you'll save time by skipping something like an art editor. However I'd be very excited to have an in-engine fictional sound chip and I think it'd be fun ^u^. It's really up to how limited it is. Good luck with your project Noel!

Yeah ... I might find a middle ground of a very simple sprite editor for small projects, but it can still read/import sprites from programs like Aseprite easily if you drop them in the project folder. Thanks! :)