Grid Maker

No more using text editors to design complicated two-dimensional levels!

The controls are fairly straight forwards, but there are a lot of them to explain:

• Hold the mouse down within the grid area to draw. Clicking on the same colour as you have selected to erase.
• Click on a number/colour at the side to select it.
• You can change the colours by using the colour pickers
• and change the character used for each colour by clicking on the text field once that colour is selected.
• The top option is the character used for erasing, and is the default character.
• Click on columns, rows, and grid size to change the size/scale of the drawing area.
• Click on export to open a window from which you can copy and paste the text. (clicking on the export window highlights all the text)

The export options has four choices:
• as text — exports the grid with no spacing.
• with commas — exports the grid with commas between the characters.
• with spaces — exports the grid with spaces between the characters.
• as Array — exports the grid for as an Array for use in Actionscript or any other programming language which uses the same array syntax

It's also resizable, so click download to open a new window where you can make it as large (or as small) as you like!




I made this a while ago to help me with creating two-dimensional arrays and level data for my programming stuff, instead of having to individually edit the characters in a text editing program. Originally it only had one colour, and I would manually change the grid size and scale within the code. However, with Ludum Dare coming up, I figured I should polish it up a bit and release it, to save a lot of tediousness in designing levels or similar things.

To save myself from feature creep, I had to stop, but other things I /might/ add to it one day include:
• Adding (and deleting) colours
• Choosing the spacing character for exporting
• Clearing the drawing area
• Being able to upload an image or swf file as a background to edit on top of, and a transparency setting.

If you're clever with swf files you could embed this one on top of another to do that last one.



I didn't really design it for pixel art but maybe you could use it for that if you felt like it? Unfortunately there's no graphical export option, but you could just take a screenshot.

EDIT: Oh... Just found a bug. If you make the draw area too big (rows and columns), and then export, the textfield covers the entire screen and you can't escape it. To fix this bug: press tab, then space, until a window pops up (either a colour picker panel or the export options list), then click on that window.

EDIT2: World's longest description