| --- Level Editor V1.0 --- |

Hello! It's been a while since the last update for Micro Kitty, but I'm here to let you know that development is still ongoing.

The sprint for Micro Kitty Alpha V-008 is hard in the works, but to get there I needed to create a tool to make things easier for my level designer. Since they can't sit there for hours on end placing individual tiles, I've been creating a level editor to speed up the process.

I started with splitting my tileset into it's individual 8x8 tiles as a sprite resource in my project.

Once that was done, I could start mapping out the different blocks of tiles into their individual groups in code. This way I could always know which tiles went with which sets.

After a few switch/case statements and some for loops, I had the first set of tiles in the editor. It wasn't much, but I had correctly set up my auto tiling system for the editor.  Allowing me to draw the tiles without worrying about placing corners or manually placing random detail tiles within the ground. I could also apply complete variant versions of tiles such as the stone blocks seen below, where there are both broken and unbroken blocks.

Now that the hard part was out of the way, I quickly started adding the rest of the tile elements to the editors functionality.

Bridges

Grasses and vegetation

And finally adding in the specific design limitation elements that help with display limitations for NES games which Micro Kitty is being developed with.

With the new level editor almost ready, I just needed to add in a way to save the level data so I could ad it easily to the game. Surprisingly, it was easier than I thought it would be, and I managed to get it set up and working in only a short few hours.

At the same time as saving the details of each tile, it also saves an image of the screen. This image is what I'll be using in the final version as I can set up all the objects and invisible collision boxes over top of these background screens.

There are still a few things that I have yet to add in though. One of which is layers. I made an attempt to add layers, but it ended up breaking the program. So I removed it and for now I guess it'll have to stick to a single layer.

So that's it! That's the first iteration of the Micro Kitty level editor.
I haven't decided if the final version will be released for the public to use, but we'll see what happens.

Thanks for reading through and I hope you enjoyed this development update.

If you have any questions or even some suggestions please leave them in the comments below.

- Sterling (SilverBlaze) : Programmer/Lead Developer