Editor!

Today I am pleased to announce an early alpha of the Asciilands editor! It allows much easier creation and editing of the maps and shows how it will look in real time.
Creation of good dev-tools was always part of the plan with Asciilands and so far, this feels like the most triumphant example.

Enough talk, you probably want to see it. Maybe. Here it is!

You can't christen a map editor with anything other than some horrible in-game text so that's exactly what I did.

The interface is fairly self-explanatory; choose from the world tiles on the left and the scenery objects on the right and add them to where the cross-hair is.

Editing text files like we've always done is fine but there are distinct advantages to this kind of interface:

• It's much faster to make a change.
• It can be transitioned to instantly from test play.
• This means, for example, that play testers could not only tell us about map annoyances or oddities but they can immediately cross over and change it to what they might have expected.
• It's prettier and nicer and doesn't suffer from the distortion that non-square characters impose on text-based maps.
• My eyes will hurt way less when I'm trying to do the dual-tone walls of cave interiors, trying to distinguish between lower-case and capital Ws in huge blocks.

Other development developments are as follows:

• New behavior system complete and original behaviors transitioned to new system
• I will be doing a blog comparing and discussing the two systems soon.
• Added a few extra features and areas to testIsland to test new improvements (e.g. BluffCave now has a second, deeper, and much larger area to test the various way to enhance in-game visibility).

Development continues!
As ever, anyone interested in testing Asciilands (or the new editor) remotely in invited to let me know!

Behaviour system blog will be coming soon.