#brickmaster apprentice

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Brickmaster Apprentice

Remember this? Well, probably not, because I'm really obscure even when you're in the right tag, but take a look at these during-development pictures and what I have to say related to them. The picture above is of a buggy toolbar state, and the picture below is of some of the absolute earliest testing with polygon creation on a polygon layer. Those number tiles and the ones with things like “ID” or “PATH” on them are how I currently customize entities and such by placing tags right next to the entity while drawing the map, which I suppose I could make a better alternative method to replace it. Maybe I’ll add an Entity Layer feature, where you can add properties to entities by adding fields and typing stuff in them.

This is a personal tile mapping program that I’ve been developing exclusively and in an unorthodox way because I’m using a 2D game engine instead of actual application construction to make it happen. It works alright! Many strides have been made since I last posted anything about it on Tumblr, too.

The name is Brickmaster Apprentice. It used to be called Mineral Tiles Mapmaker, but because I have misophonia and people absolutely violate the letter “L” all the fucking time, thinking about that title pissed me off enough to put myself at a disadvantage for more than a minute just to make it a thing of the past.

The biggest advancement lately has been getting the polygon creation tool to exist. Now I can draw and save polygons in my own format...

...using a program that I find reliable and that I can fix all by myself if I find something wrong with it. Tiled had this thing where zooming in and out would fucking freak out at the slightest provocation, and when moving saved map files from Tiled to another place, critical elements of the map (or just literally every picture in it) would completely disappear, ETC. So I built a program that gets me because I get it and we think the same, and now designing levels is golden.

Here’s the polygon layer snapping to grid squares beside the tile layer. Now, this might look cute, but I wouldn’t recommend asking for a copy of Brickmaster Apprentice as it is right now AT ALL, unless you want a map editor that doesn’t let you select what tile you’ll draw with by clicking its icon because everything other than drawing is handled exclusively by hotkeys, that doesn’t have an undo button, that doesn’t have an enclosed fill tool, that makes you scroll through the tile selection upwards or downwards in increments of 1, that doesn’t have an easy way to delete polygons in it, that has no automated way of starting new maps in it having you copy and paste code and editing it each time, that saves larger tile maps incredibly slowly while becoming unresponsive for that whole time, that doesn’t exist as an executable file so that you have to download LOVE for it to run, and that saves to an obscure folder in Appdata rather than a place in Explorer of your choosing.

As I said, this program is good for me. I have very specific needs with a tile editor, and the program I made fulfills those while sacrificing some other blessings and conveniences. But most people who aren’t me would probably hate using Brickmaster Apprentice. I don’t think people want a mapping tool that I created, but if somebody really badly does want this, they should at least wait for Brickmaster. The future non-Apprentice version. The version I have right now is basically this: