Tiedy allows rapid, game-agnostic tilemap authoring that can be exported into a an easy-to-read, easy-to-parse format.
The motivation: My education is in programming, but I also use Photoshop professionally on a daily basis. Photoshop has by no means a perfect UI, but many people are familiar with it. I am so accustomed to and comfortable with the interface that I have previously used Photoshop as a level editor, where pixel colour mapped to game object. This gets unwieldily when you have more than a few tiles, let alone many. The plan with Tiedy is to take a small subset of Photoshop's UI and use it in a tile editing context. The contents of that subset will be determined first by my personal workflow (the features that I use) and then possibly by the suggestions of others.
Tiedy does not have a "clouds filter" or "dodge tool". It is not a pixel editor. The features Tiedy emulates are of a more navigational or conceptual nature. Examples of the UI features that Tiedy borrows from Photoshop:
- Keyboard shortcuts for relevant tools (brush, fill, eraser)
- Spacebar panning
- Layers
- Canvas resizing
- Undo and history
- Boolean marquis selection; radial marquis selection; floating selections.
The save format is currently a custom-made, plaintext format, but I am considering XML and JSON. Saved maps contain the coordinates of each placed tile, and associated the tile ID. For example, an single entry might indicate that on layer 2, at coordinate (22,66), there is a tile with the ID "brick wall 3". It is up to the end application (the game, etc. that is using Tiedy-generated tilemaps) to interpret this as it likes. Canvases, layers, and individual tiles can be marked up with arbitrary key-value pairs for extra data. For example, a single tile could be marked up with
signpost_text -> Welcome to Kakariko Village.
Tiedy can be loaded with multiple palettes. Palettes are essentially a collection of tile IDs, each paired with a graphical representation for use in Tiedy. Palettes take the form of plaintext data files that point to an adjacent image file for graphics.
The application is being developed in Unity3D, so Tiedy will be available for Mac and PC at minimum.
I have a full-time job; don't hold your breath.
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