Hi again! I’m looking for help creating levels for the latest game I’ve been working on, Spinny the Runner. The game includes a built-in level editor, but unfortunately, it’s not compatible with Tiled.
That said, the functions responsible for loading and saving maps — as well as the map format itself — are simple enough that adding Tiled compatibility should definitely be possible! While the built-in editor offers some unique features (like drawing entity sizes and previewing/playing levels in real-time), Tiled’s simplicity and flexibility might attract more contributors and make level design more accessible.
Recently, the game has grown quite a bit! It now features a story mode and a range of new RPG-style elements, including:
- Shops where players can trade items
- NPCs to interact with
- A full dialogue system
- An inventory system
- Switches, keys, doors, and much more!
These new mechanics open up lots of creative possibilities for level design.
For reference, here are the current map loading and saving functions:
Making sure you're not a bot!
It’s also technically possible to have Tiled export directly to the game’s map format — though given that this is a niche engine with only one game and a demo, it might not be worth the effort. Still, the option is there for anyone interested.
I’ll include a screenshot of a couple of levels to give you an idea of how they look.
If you’re interested in contributing — whether by designing levels or helping develop a Tiled-compatible importer/exporter — feel free to reach out or share your work!
One of the main challenges to overcome is that the built-in editor works primarily with textured vectors. This means there are no limits to the precision and size you can assign to each entity. While this offers great versatility, it also makes level creation unnecessarily complex.
In contrast, using Tiled, where each element is represented as a tile with consistent proportions, would simplify the level design process significantly. It would also enhance symmetry and consistency across levels.
The screenshots below show the map loaded in Tiled. As you can see, the cells don’t align properly. However, creating a tileset with each entity and importing it into Tiled should not be too hard and is definitely possible.
test.tsx (469 Bytes)
In summary and to make this post useful, what needs to be done:
- Importer (or exporter from tile) to the map format of boxclip engine
- Create a tileset with proportional cells based on the textures of the game
Once the importer is done there are also performance considerations that needs to be considered, however that would be refinements that could be posponed:
If cells are too small and the importer or exporter creates an entity for each cell, there could be performance problems on mobile platforms due to the restricted resources of the arm platforms. Cells belonging to the same kind fo texture should be exported as single entities to avoid creating too much entitties that could eventually be too much for the cpu of mobile phones.
