You don’t have to be in game development long to realize the need for a good level editor. For my 2D game, I experimented with quite a few tools. There are definitely some great 2D level editors out there, like Tiled, which I still use for simple things like static collision detection and tile types. However, like usual, I wanted a little more power. Here are a few features that I really wanted, but are difficult to find in most 2D level editors:

• Non tile-based
• The ability to resize/scale/flip/crop sprites
• The ability to re-color/tint/erase portions of a sprite
• Supports drawing paths (for moving npcs)
• Can preferably set per-node or per-segment data (for defining wander radius, speed, loiter time, etc)

While there are a few solutions that come close, such as GLEED2D, for my needs, I felt it was still lacking. I spent a good chunk of time trying to find the perfect level editor, and then I had an epiphany – Photoshop does all of this already!

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