Level editor Thread

Hello guys!
I'm in the middle of the creation of a mini game using pygame but i feel like i'm wasting my time. After using Unity 3D where i could make as many levels in no time i think i'm doing this all wrong. Every time i want to create a level i head up to notepad and write a combination of numbers and then restart the game loading that file. This takes me a lot of time and is super confuse.

The questions are:
- Is there any tool/program that can easily do that for me? with instant play maybe.
- Do i need to create my own level editor? What do i need to know? Should it be in python or c++ or other?
- Should i convert my code and use an engine like Unity3D?

- Where can i get information about scene/level programming structure?

Notes:
- I don't mind translating my code to another p.language, i just want to get a final version of the game.
- I'm using Linux now. i really want to be independent from windows unless it is the last option.

Thank you all

Edited by: GGraca

there are quite a few tools out there for this

the big ones are DAME

Dambots.com

and TileEd

Tilemap.co.uk

and Mappy

Mapeditor.org

I cast my vote with Tiled. It's supported with many engines and has a pretty easy-to-use structure. I find it to be pretty powerful for how small it is.

Whereas Unity is a full featured engine, Pygame is a multimedia library, so you're basically starting from scratch. It's not a bad thing, you just won't have fancy built in level-editors.

- I have some experience with Tiled, mentioned above, it's simple enough to use and there are a few map loading libraries already written specifically for using Tiled's map format with Pygame, and can be found here: Github.com

- You could write your own map editor, but that's a sizable project. It's hard to recommend going this route unless you need some feature that's not offered by all the free and open source map editors out there, or you just want the experience of writing a map editor. One note though, writing a map editor in C++ would be kinda overkill. You could write it in Python with a GUI API like PyQt

- Can't say anything about Unity as I've never used it.

- About scene/level programming structure, if you're looking for info on how to manage game states in Pygame and switching between them, (such as titlescreen, level 1, pause screen, level 2, ect.) then you're looking for this: Content.gpwiki.org

I managed to create one level editor with a friend in flash. It's simple because each level doesnt require much information. I'll stil have a look on those programs, thank you.

Edited by: GGraca

I use Unity and I make the terrains in Blender from a heightmap and it works great, I can control how many polygons and make levels I feel good about. Can split a heightmap to make chunks that you put together so you can cull ones not in view.

For 2d I use tiled. Even screenshot 3d models in unity to make 2d models/sprites