Is there ever a time when creating a level/world editor with your game is a bad idea? [closed]

Question

I have created a few smaller games on my own in the past. My approach has always been to create a completed editor where it has all the functionality needed to save a level file and load it into the game.

This has always made most sense to me but I keep hearing from people that a game is never fully done in the editor. I have never worked in a game development team and so I don't have first hand experience, but not adding everything needed to make the game to the editor just seams wrong.

Am I missing something? Is there ever a reason not to add a tool to the editor?

Answer 1

The game editor is for editing the properties of your game-specific entities, together with their specific actions, ai, triggers, etc. But you also need a scripting language binding such as Lua, Python, Unreal script, your own scripting language.. to pass level-design specifics easier. You'll find out that for a strategy game, it's impossible to do complicated things such as assigning different strategies to the same units based on complicated triggers and analyzers and not hardcoding a bunch of that business.

Scripts are good because they are easier for people to work with and aid in customizing the "story" for a certain map/level. Game designers don't need to know heavy programming to see how things evolve if they want to change the logic. This might be just one of the things you can do in a scripting language without hardcoding a plethora of options in the editor alone.

Answer 2

Time spent making your editor is taken away from the team programming the game.

So you really want to make the simplest editor you can.

Ideally, in order of preference:

• Use an existing editor application unmodified (maybe not a game-specific one) and write conversion / import tools to build the level based on its output
• Use an existing game editor (perhaps from a library or toolkit you use), adapt it to your needs
• Build the simplest editor you can, ideally reusing as much of the game-code as you can

Of course you need good tools so your content team can make the content efficiently. But consider what the best tool is?

Suppose you have a seemingly simple feature such as "undo" - developing this feature is extremely nontrivial, and it would be better to use an existing tool (which already has such a feature) than to try to implement it.

I cannot stress enough, how much better the first two approaches are!

Answer 3

There is quite a bit of scope to this question.

Games made for profit

Triple A titles are often/usually produced under a time constraint set by financial backers that don't care about the quality of the game, but the profits it generates. Thus the editor is predominately a short cut and will do "80%" of the work, the other "20%" is things specific to the game being made, fine tuning, and rare/one-off objects/events (thus not worth investing time to create a tool and then the object, event, etc.). It can also be damaging if the game feels too similar to the the previous one or another title already out there. Basically is it financially worth the time to develop the tool especially if you are going to tweak what it produces anyway.

Games made for other reasons

Games are works of art, and so is the way in which you make games thus there is no right or wrong way. It all comes down to what you enjoy making. If you enjoy tool development then make all the tools you like. If you enjoy turning out lots of games then making generic tools can expedite this, but can end up making them feel too similar thus the time spent out of the editor to tweak them to their own style. You might also want to test out an concept, but not want to invest a lot of time developing an editor.

In game level editor's Editor's in games can cause issues; being buggy or make too much of a demand on the system (especially for hand held and mobile platforms) and thus are best avoided as not to tarnish the polished product.

This answer is currently incomplete

Answer 4

My answer is "it depends". My current phone game project at home would totally not benefit from a level editor. This is because my levels are a set of very simple parameters that are used to procedurally generate the grids. That's on one end.

On the other end, there are high-level AAA games which are so large and complex, you really, really need quality editor. One reason Unity and Unreal Engine are useful is because the include an editor.

So where you are on this scale determines how much time should go into your editor. If your game is simple enough so that you'd spend 5 times as long making the editor as the game without the editor, then it's not worth the trouble. But if making the editor was say 50% of your dev time, but your total dev time would triple if you didn't make the editor, then it's definitely worth making.