A tile engine is born

If you're familiar with a bit of the project I'm working on you'll know that a 2D tile engine is a major part of the game.  A major part of the game will involve creating building foundations, the floor plans of the interiors, and placing objects on top of those floor plans.  To make doing so fun we're going to need a strong suite of tools available to the user to manipulate the world with.

Since my last update I've begun to construct the tile engine and tile objects for the game and the beginning of the tool suite that will be available for building in game play.  Let's take a look at the visible progress made so far:

The grid can be toggled on and off as desired.

Here we see the opening of an empty map.  The familiar palette window now contains color options with which to paint.  The label below the buttons indicates with which color you are currently painting.  Painting is done by holding left mouse over the cell you wish to paint.  Left-click dragging multiple cells results in painting all cells crossed by the motion of the pointer.

Drag selection filling

Right now the engine also supports a drag selection mode.  In this mode you can select a block of cells with one motion and fill it with a color.  If the grid is not visible a temporary grid is shown to indicate your current cell selection.

Basic floorplan

And here's our result.  A floor plan of a basic building with two rooms containing an entrance from the exterior and an interior room with an entrance off of the main room.










More design tools will definitely be forthcoming as the engine matures.  I'm excited to show off progress on this in the coming days.

Let's talk about the actual game for a second.  One of the planned features of the game will be a Blueprinting mode.  In this mode you will be able to construct the area exactly as you wish it to look but without actually spending your in-game currency to purchase the objects required to create it.  In this Blueprint mode you will be able to place an object, rotate it, re-select it and move it, delete it, and all of the functionality you would expect to be available to you in a builder.
You will then be able to switch into a Builder mode, select a previous blueprinted object, and then choose to build it immediately with a button press.  Does this feature sound useful and more importantly fun?  Let me know if you have thoughts in the comments section.

Thanks to everyone for following my progress here!