LÖVE

You sound very similar to me.
5 years ago I started making games with RPG Maker XP, quickly switched to RPG Maker VX, made 1 full game, made a bunch of crap afterwards and learned how to program in RGSS2, I became quite the script kiddie, then eventually I jumped to Game Maker temporary (its a piece of crap ). Then on Minecraft I jumped to ComputerCraft, learned LUA almost completely in two weeks, spent about 2 months at it, found Love2D, made a Music Player then I started making an actual game and I'm having a little bit of trouble coding every now and then, but overall this engine is EPIC and unique. Welcome to the community and I hope you make some friends here as well!

@mk352:
RPG Maker is still so much fun, I still just mess around with it a bit but I never tried RGSS, I was learning ruby a bit but then thought it would be better to just branch off like yourself and learn to make games that are not restricted to rpg maker. Lua is very easy, I really enjoy coding with it, it reminds me of visual basic only even simpler ( for example variables can be used more loosely ).

@BlackBulletIV
what I meant with Paint.NET was to use the layers and a grid to work as a sort of graphical interface to aid level design, I had no idea that it was actually used as a level editor before.
I checked out tiled qt after reading your previous post actually, but I might make something more arcade first and just have it (tiledQT) on the side for future projects.

by procedurally generated games you mean games that have random maps each time you play right? like dig-dug ? any examples you know so I can see how they work ?

Minecraft has a procedurally generated map

Echo wrote:what I meant with Paint.NET was to use the layers and a grid to work as a sort of graphical interface to aid level design, I had no idea that it was actually used as a level editor before.

Well, you could have each level as an image, with each tile being a pixel in the image. You could then read the image as an ImageData object and go through each pixel. Each pixel has four numbers from 0 to 255 associated with it: red, green, blue, and alpha. You could use those numbers to select which tile you want to display on screen, and other things too. For example, red could be the tile number (which allows for 255 tiles), and green could indicate the tile's type (example: 0 = display only, 1 = solid, 2 = danger, etc.).

Come to think of it, I should do a tutorial on this sometime.

Echo wrote:by procedurally generated games you mean games that have random maps each time you play right? like dig-dug ? any examples you know so I can see how they work ?

Yeah, kind of like that. It doesn't have to be as complicated as Minecraft or anything; procedural generation can be quite simple sometimes. I've created two things using procedural generation in LÖVE: my game, Facilitated Escape, and an old test to with procedural cave generation.

i am also new here .....

nice to meet you
^=^

One of LÖVE's biggest advantages is the freedom it gives you. If you want a level editor, I recommend making one yourself. But I'd asay that it's probably better to start off with something simpler to learn the basic. Don't ask "how do maka level editor?", because there are thousands of ways it could be done, and it all depends on your needs as well as your own personal programming style, which is something you will find soon enough. Instead, ask yourself "What do I want my level editor to be like?" And then make it.

Making editors isn't so difficult. I'm going to assert that using Rm2k has influenced your idea of a 'level editor'. You should think of it more as a 'content creation' tool, in that you might want to create other content than just levels. Someone recently posted a particle editor on here. However, if you're wanting to make maps your editor doesn't have to be anywhere near the complexity of RPG Maker.

If you work on your game first your editor will mostly be pasted code from that. Your editor will render the maps just like in the game but instead of a guy walking around you use the mouse to change tiles. Add a little palette to select tiles and you're done. If you need to make something similar to events you can just reference an npc from your script, and you wouldn't need to make any sort of fancy gui since you just code the 'events' themselves in your scripts. Also, in your editor code you don't need to keep it super-optimised and bad code isn't so much of a problem. As long as it works for you it doesn't matter.

So, just don't worry about it. Start your project and build the gameplay up until it gets to a point where you can start to fill it out with levels and other content. Then just port the necessary parts over in order to display your levels in the editor and use love.mouse and love.filesystem, perhaps with some simple buttons (though hotkeys are quicker to use and implement) to switch between simple tools (draw a tile, erase tile e.t.c).

I'm a newbie too..and was amazed how things are done here...can't wait to learn more about love!:)