Game Maker For Toolset Development

I spent yesterday and part of today developing this editor for myself, to help me design the stages for my Flash platformer project.

The editor allows me to place game objects and resize/move them. I can also edit arbitrary amounts of "attributes" for placed objects (for example, I can place a treasure chest then specify the amount of coins in it, but other objects might have different attributes such as speed or direction that I can tweak).

I used Game Maker to build the editor, and it worked out perfectly. I even have it automatically spitting out XML files (which the game translates into levels) and backup files (which the editor can load to edit the stages) right into the project's assets folder. Now I can really start producing content.

The editor probably won't ever be released publicly, except maybe as an example. It is pretty rough around the edges and allows the user to do things that wouldn't work well in the game, such as setting moving platforms or enemies to travel through solid blocks. As a developer tool, though, it works great.

Overall, I'm really pleased with how easily I could hack together an editor in Game Maker. I'm aiming for the entire development cycle of this project to be shorter than a month, so I don't have much time to muck around building tools for myself. As a bonus, I was able to code the editor in a way that it can potentially be very reusable for me (it is very easy to add or remove objects or change the output format).