XNA : Sector12 Games

Posts tagged as 'XNA'

World Builder - a Photoshop Level Editor

December 30, 2014 by shaun

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!

Font Kerning in XNA - Part 2

September 24, 2014 by shaun

In Part 1 of this series, I gave a brief overview of the various font formats, kerning data, and how they are handled in XNA. In Part 2, I’d like to talk about my solution, and what was required to make it work.

To reiterate from my previous post, the basic goal of my font kerning project was to extract horizontal kerning data from font files of various formats, and save it in an organized, easily usable format.

Font Kerning in XNA - Part 1

September 22, 2014 by shaun

A while back I did a write-up on my FontBuilder project, which made mention of a tool I created for extracting font kerning data from font files. Although I’ve since moved from XNA to Unity, and this tool is no longer required, I still wanted to record all of my notes, and document what I’ve created, just in case it ever has some use in the future.

Font Kernalizer (my kerning data extraction tool)

Font Builder

September 16, 2014 by shaun

Although I’m no longer using XNA, I dabbled in it for quite some time, and learned a great deal. For me, one of the trickier parts was implementing custom fonts. Although I’ve since moved on to developing in Unity, I wanted to make a quick write-up for my old FontBuilder project. It was a pretty cool tool at the time, and it taught me a lot about scripting for Photoshop.