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[Conker]

a

[Polly]

I've never felt a need or reason to do so.. but I'm sure there are plenty that I'm just not seeing. So why should I move away from the built in editor in place of a custom one?

My primary reason for building a custom ( in-engine ) editor is so i can edit levels while the game is running. This gives you the shortest feedback loop possible, which results in increased productivity & quality.

[voidSkipper]

There are three reasons to make a level editor:

1) Because making one would make building your project faster (with the time spent making the editor into account) and there are no pre-made editors that will suffice.

2) Because you want to learn how to make an editor.

3) Because you find making level editors fun.

If none of those things apply, don't make an editor.

[Tokinsom]

Helps with collaboration, too. Sucks having to use subversion control and everything just to have friends or team mates help build levels. With a custom external editor you can just work together over dropbox or something.

Aside from that, you can write your own tools and generally customize the editor for your particular game. I haven't used Game Maker much, but I do remember its level editor being horrendous...so I would think a custom level editor would be necessary for most projects.

[Cheezmeister]

There are three reasons to make a level editor:

1) Because making one would make building your project faster (with the time spent making the editor into account) and there are no pre-made editors that will suffice.

2) Because you want to learn how to make an editor.

3) Because you find making level editors fun.

If none of those things apply, don't make an editor.

Of those (1) is possible but pretty unlikely, because DAME and Tiled are really, really good.

(2) and (3) are always valid

[Codimal]

With a custom external editor you can just work together over dropbox or something.

You can do that with all the editors, as long as they create separate files.
Version control could still be useful though.

[Sik]

If you're going to use a custom editor just to work on-line then take it further and make it possible for multiple users to work on the same level at the same time (sorta like how Google Docs works, multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously).

[darkhog]

There are three reasons to make a level editor:

1) Because making one would make building your project faster (with the time spent making the editor into account) and there are no pre-made editors that will suffice.

2) Because you want to learn how to make an editor.

3) Because you find making level editors fun.

If none of those things apply, don't make an editor.

Agreed and I'd also add the following:

4) Because you want game to be easily moddable so players can make their own levels and share them (whether via Steam Workshop or via fanmade sharing sites).

That was the reason I've made a custom level editor for my own game as I don't want people to DL entirety of Unity just to make some levels.

[and0]

Well, if you feel like you don't need one then you probably don't need one.

However, one thing that annoyed me about the Game Maker editor is that it doesn't have a fill tool. It never bothered me enough to actually create my own map editor, but after working with other engines and using Tiled I'm not going back.

[muki]

Bit of a necro bump, but I learnt a thing over the weekend that might help.

I had been frustrated over GM's room editor for a couple years. Along with my fundamental laziness, I blame it for never getting very far with projects. So this weekend I decided to do something about it and research some of those external level editors. For now I might give Tiled a try:

http://www.mapeditor.org/

A couple reasons. It has proper nameable layers (GM does not, its layer system is infuriating), and an interesting auto-tiling and terrain tiling feature. Mainly it's the layers though. I needed the ability to get creative with multiple levels of depth. It supports objects too. It doesn't natively support GM, but it exports to .JSON format, which the following GM script helps with:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamemaker/comments/4dpri9/tiled_gms_v0alpha_some_simple_tools_for_using_map/

So what I did is I took this script, picked it apart line by line (it's not a hugely complicated script). What it does is at runtime, opens a .JSON map you've exported out of Tiled, creates the needed tile backgrounds, readjusts the room dimensions/settings and fills it with what you had in Tiled, assuming you set everything up properly.

It does layers/depth order sort of automatically, based on the order of your layers in Tiled, though I might modify the script so that it takes a depth value I enter in Tiled instead.

More importantly, it does objects! It doesn't look like much in Tiled, might just be a grey box, but as long as you name its "type" exactly the same as an object in your GM project, the script will fill the room with the objects you placed in Tiled.

[0xDEADBAAD]

As a general rule (I do not use Game Maker but I think it still applies), when doing level design you should aim to minimize the cost of experimenting as much as possible.

Custom editors generally help a lot with that because they usually extend the engine's capabilities in some way and sometimes (more likely when you build them yourself) provide EXACTLY the functionality you need.

Depending on what tool you use, you might not end up making an entire level editor but small tools to solve specific problems and rely on the parts of the engine that work well for you (I do this in Unity and it helps a great deal for relatively small amount of code).

As I see it, as long as it helps you make your desing-to-test iteration shorter, you should try to make/get tools to aid your level design.

Also, I never done so but many people told me that making your level editor ingame and, while it makes perfect sense, it has a  pretty big base amount of work to get it going. I think it will pay in the long term, though.

[Alessio]

I also feel that, when using a game development framework, one should want to build a level editor, not be forced to.
Game Maker's room editor is very limited. I've heard that even Clickteam Fusion's one was as well. No one should be forced to make an editor from scratch because of it. Even importing new graphics in an already compiled game could become a problem, but i'm not sure.

[oahda]

Been following you lately, Alessio, but I haven't been quite sure what advice to give. I know you don't want to delve too deeply into programming, and that's the biggest problem with the suggestion I would give you, I suppose, but here goes:

The Unity editor is very versatile and has a lot of great tools, and you can program your own or download free add-ons relatively easily without having to rebuild your own editor from scratch, because the whole thing is built to be extended and customisable off the bat.

So editor-wise, I really think you might be very happy with Unity. The problem would be that Unity is more programming-focused than GM or Construct or whatever you've been looking into. There are probably various plugins to help with that, tho (Fungus for adding conversation dialogue boxes without much programming, for example).

Would seem a pity tho, if you had to throw GM away after buying a book on it (at least if it was expensive). :c

[Alessio]

Been following you lately, Alessio, but I haven't been quite sure what advice to give. I know you don't want to delve too deeply into programming, and that's the biggest problem with the suggestion I would give you, I suppose, but here goes:

The Unity editor is very versatile and has a lot of great tools, and you can program your own or download free add-ons relatively easily without having to rebuild your own editor from scratch, because the whole thing is built to be extended and customisable off the bat.

So editor-wise, I really think you might be very happy with Unity. The problem would be that Unity is more programming-focused than GM or Construct or whatever you've been looking into. There are probably various plugins to help with that, tho (Fungus for adding conversation dialogue boxes without much programming, for example).

Would seem a pity tho, if you had to throw GM away after buying a book on it (at least if it was expensive). :c

Wasn't about me, anyway. I just wanted to give two cents about building a level editor.
And i reconfirm, regradeless my tastes: i shouldn't be forced to build my own level editor but i have to want it. And GameMaker's editor is one that is very limited and if someone ask the random GameMaker user they'll likely confirm this. If you don't find workarounds for it, GMS's room editor is gonna be extremely frustrating.
It had nothing to do with what i was writing in other thread

But, regrading the Unity matter, anyway: i don't know if i would use Unity for a videogame that has a mere 256x240 pixels on screen. If i wanted to make a Rayman Legends-like game, Unity would be the way to go, for me. But it's too much for me, for now. If i wanted to make a pixel game, i believe using a "less powerful" (compared to UE4 and Unity) framework is more apporpriate. Let's face it, there is a reason Undertale and Gunpoint aren't made with Unity.
Won't abandon GameMaker... unless YoYo goes subscription-only (which i think it's a money-eater business practice if you force everyone pay forever for a software and not everyone wants to pay forever). But that's another story that would deserve its own thread.

[JWK5]

And i reconfirm, regradeless my tastes: i shouldn't be forced to build my own level editor but i have to want it.

Except you're not being forced to build your own level editor. GM:S' room editor is clunky but not impossible to work with, most of what you'd need in a custom level editor can already be done with the default editor just not as smoothly. Building your own editor is mostly a matter of convenience and improving work flow. Especially if you are running a game on such a small scale as 256x240 I really don't see how GM's default room editor is that crippling.

That said, a basic custom editor is really not that difficult to build, especially for a small-scale game. I've got to start on my LD36 entry this evening when the contest starts and I will be set on that for the next 48 hours but after that, if you'd like, I can create a tutorial to walk you through the steps of making a custom editor in GM:S (I'll put it up in the tutorial section of the forums here). It has the added bonus of also giving you some knowledge needed to make a HUD/menu system as well as custom save files.

[alvarop]

And i reconfirm, regradeless my tastes: i shouldn't be forced to build my own level editor but i have to want it.

Except you're not being forced to build your own level editor. GM:S' room editor is clunky but not impossible to work with, most of what you'd need in a custom level editor can already be done with the default editor just not as smoothly. Building your own editor is mostly a matter of convenience and improving work flow. Especially if you are running a game on such a small scale as 256x240 I really don't see how GM's default room editor is that crippling.

That said, a basic custom editor is really not that difficult to build, especially for a small-scale game. I've got to start on my LD36 entry this evening when the contest starts and I will be set on that for the next 48 hours but after that, if you'd like, I can create a tutorial to walk you through the steps of making a custom editor in GM:S (I'll put it up in the tutorial section of the forums here). It has the added bonus of also giving you some knowledge needed to make a HUD/menu system as well as custom save files.

One level undo is the worst thing I've seen in a game engine.

[JWK5]

One level undo is the worst thing I've seen in a game engine.

GM:S then ups the ante by having the one of the most obnoxious means of deleting placed tiles/objects I've seen. I really don't understand some of their design decisions when it comes to the room editor.

Like I said, it's clunky (but not impossible).

[Alessio]

Well, maybe my words were overexaggerated, but i didn't really mean its totally impossible. It just turns down the creative part of level design at a very big level. Also, with GameMaker you can't set the z-ordering of tiles... also the z-ordering in-editor doesn't work properly as it doesn't look like what looks like in-game.

Again, i could understand if i paid $20, not a big $150 if i wanted the "professional" version. Because while the GML is powerful enough to get things done, the tool's look is unprofessioanl at best. It seemed YoYo's higher-ups didn't really care to fix these problems.

Seriously, everytime i have to put hands on GM's room editor i feel like this:

[Polly]

Nobody's forcing you to use Game Maker. If you don't like it, there are plenty of alternatives available.

[Sik]

That still doesn't change the fact it could be better. Game Maker isn't exactly a recent tool.