GDevelop VS tiled

5 × GDevelop Gold license for 12 months

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

I'm not really a game maker, but would like to give a shout out to the fabulous https://gdevelop.io/

It has everything you need, is free and its VISUAL PROGRAMMING is fab...

After they switched to a monthly/annual subscription fee with the release of construct 3, I pretty much threw in the towel and switched over to Gdevelop.

https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop

Open source, completely free, and I can run it as a native application on my computer versus a weird web app. The idea that my game is basically tied to a SaaS is just not OK for me.

Another engine that you can consider is GDevelop https://gdevelop.io

GDevelop is a free, no-code game engine that uses drag-and-drop functionality and menus to build games. It supports Javascript to impliment more complex code. To find out more go to –  How to get started making a video game: GDevelop 5 (part one)

When you decide on the high-level design of the resume, start building your map in Tiled. You can customise the map from the basic game you already have or build your one from scratch - just try and see what works best for you.

When I first messed with Phaser, I just used a 2D array to plop in my tiles, but that was very tedious. That's when I discovered the Tiled map editor! I was able to "paint" with my tilemap to create a map with various layers. I made a ground layer, a wall layer, an enemy layer, and a potion layer.

I use Tiled with this tileset I found in Pilot NET. The maps it creates are entirely form over function - no fancy art or effects unless you add them a different way - but they're very legible. Then I use Foundry's drawing tools to sketch out outlines for cover, object sizes, etc. (Here's an example of a map I made for a Train Heist combat - orange is Size 1, yellow is soft cover, purple is difficult terrain, and so on.)

I'm pretty happy with Tiled, which is widely used for this: https://www.mapeditor.org

I'm making this plugin because Godot 4 won't be mainstream for a long time (yes, it's awesome and I already love it). And in version 3.5, the TileMapEditor is very hard to use. Of course, it is possible to use "Tiled" editor and vnen/godot-tiled-importer, but this is also not always convenient. https://www.mapeditor.org/ https://github.com/vnen/godot-tiled-importer

The level editor shown here is called Tiled.

As I went through the code samples of the Pokémon clone provided in the article, with only a minimal understanding of sprite maps, I was surprised to see that this clone was created entirely in JavaScript and with under 200 lines of code. I learned that JSON plays a significant role in how these games work. I also realized that Aseprite alone is not enough and that another piece of the puzzle, a map editor called "Tiled," was necessary to build these JSON files.

I prototyped a working version with Tiled — it uses layers for the Y dimension, and a manually-built tileset. Individual tiles are mapped to gLTF models in the code.

I had to write my own parser for Tilededitor maps so that I could get the animated tiles working properly (If anyone needs this I could probably clean it up and share it)

also check out Tiled