How should we handle level design?

[NathanLovato]

With milestone 0.2 almost done, the next area to work on is the map.

Godot's tile map editing tools are still lacking, so I suggest that we use the Tiled map editor with the imported from vnen.

Now there's all the design work left to do to decide on the map creation pipeline. Do we try to constrain the number of layers a map should use come on which objects on properties should we use in Tiled?

If anyone has good experience with that, your feedback would you welcome. If not I'll try to find time to work on a prototype map.

[erodozer]

For the sake of an RPG I've actually had no issues with Godot's tilemap editor. It's been great for things like procedural maps, and the autotile implementation is pretty nice. For hand designed maps, I usually use a mix of tiles and sprites with grid snapping and it works pretty well. For things like specific interactions I don't rely on metadata of the tile itself, I make use of Areas with collider shapes and detect things with raycasts.

Requiring additional tooling might make this project less friendly to work on. I recommend working within the confines of Godot, and if there's anything in particular that really stands out that we feel we need or could be improved upon, then we can use our experience to suggest/contribute changes to Godot itself and in the mean time have a small workaround.

[henriiquecampos]

For things like specific interactions I don't rely on metadata of the tile itself, I make use of Areas with collider shapes and detect things with raycasts.

May I mention #50 since it seems relevant to this discussion

[NathanLovato]

Even if you use tiled, you can still edit levels in the editor as upon importing them, they're converted to tilemap nodes. But to get started yes, it's true we can work with what's available. And even add editor scripts if we need that one feature to save time!

[NathanLovato]

Okay so let's use the built-in tools and work from there to start with