Imagine Me Progress Nov 25th
Last week I talked about the Editor and what I wanted it to consist of and it's pretty much at that point right now! It has some more work to be done on it since a few things came up that I wanted to implement but first let's see what works.
This was the first time I really dove into Windows Forms with the intention of coming out with something I'd use on a regular basic. Nick Gravelyn has a video tutorial series where he creates a tile engine and an editor for it and it helped out tremendously since it's very similar to what I wanted to build. If you're looking to get into WinForms or you want to create an editor yourself I highly suggest checking it out! The Editor is based on the idea that each level is a map. Inside of that map there can be multiple layers. Right now the Editor only consists of a single layer and that's the display/collision layer. This layer only has platforms and static things that the player can collide but not interact with, so items/objects are not included in this layer. This way I can use the display/collision layer to create the platforms/walls/boundaries of the game and not have to worry about checking for items and such. My next task for the Editor is to create a layer of dynamic objects that the player can interact with. This will include blocks that the player can push to solve puzzles, etc.
If you remember from last week I described how I was going to work out collisions by doing a horizontal pass and combining all adjacent tiles into a larger rectangle. After that a vertical pass would be done to combine adjacent vertical tile. Here's what the collision looks like after doing a horizontal pass:
In this particular scenario you can see that the horizontal pass covers nearly all of the tile before even doing the vertical pass. There's plenty of room for improvement with the left column of tiles being the most obvious. Those should be combined into 2 rectangles instead of 15 but I got the idea I was shooting for implemented and it works in-game so it's good enough at this very early stage. 
After the horizontal pass, the vertical pass is done to cleanup any remaining tiles that were missed and combine them if they're vertically adjacent:
The above was simply a testbed to stress test and fix any bugs that came up with odd shapes. The level design isn't solidified so what a level may look like is still up in the air. What would be about 120 tiles or so is only 74 with this method with some vast room for improvement. I have a little character that I can use to jump around inside of here and everything seems to play out nicely besides an invisible collision box that seems to stay where my character starts...
This next week I'll get some dynamic objects implemented so I can move things with my character in-game and hopefully get some levels/puzzles setup so I can start testing those out.
Oh, and here's a screenshot of the Editor!
