@Tom Sloper Oh, gotcha. What I had in mind is something that I can easily design my data in, and then have the game import this same format. Now I'm thinking I could use spreadsheets and convert those to a JSONesque format as mentionned by @SyncViews.
Tools for designing data
If you think a spreadsheet is a good user interface for editing your game data, there are good libraries (at least for Python and C#, but doubtless for other languages) to read (and create from scratch modify) Excel or ODT documents.
This means that you can edit spreadsheets (complex ones with formulas, multiple pages, scripts, graphs, etc; not barebones CSV files!) and easily write tools for
- automated generation of draft spreadsheets (e.g. a line in the unit sheet for each PNG file that looks like a unit sprite)
- validation and reports beyond what can be done with scripts and formulas (e.g. use the game engine to detect apparently overpowered units)
- integration of different types of source files (e.g. check that mentioned assets exist and are compatible)
- exporting the simpler data formats used by your game (JSON, SQLite databases, custom text formats…)
- importing of the final data formats, allowing roundtripping (always good for test and validation purposes) and alternate tool chains (e.g. editing as a spreadsheet the results of a random level generator that produces the final format directly)
Something we started to develop a few years ago is a tool that persists those “design time data” in a database (no SQL-kind but something more flexible) that is providing exactly what you need in a straight visual and designer oriented form. Unfortunately, it is far away from being released right now.
The purpose is to have components like in an ECS environment but for game assets to describe the design time data and are attached to templates which objects inherit from. Adding/ removing properties is very easy, as same as having implicit properties and anything is handled in a generic editor, so it doesn't matter how your objects are assembled, you always have the option to view and edit them in a way you like, throw them together into a side-by-side data sheet or view them in your your game's flow graph.
It might not be as straight forward as data sheets or an SQL database but maybe you can have your own very lightweight version of such a tool
Author
@Shaarigan For statistical numeric data, I can get away with a very simple spreadsheet format. Where this falls short is when I need to manage visual assets. Say an item database, each of those items have an icon. How do I tell which item uses which icon? I would do it the most painful way:
item | image | x | y | w | h |
sword | icons.png | 0 | 0 | 32 | 32 |
shield | icons.png | 640| 96 | 32 | 32 |I open the image file, measure the coordinates for an icon and write those down. Yes it's horrible.
Ideally, excel would automate this process for me. Let me choose an image visually, and let me visually just drag a square on top of the icon so that it grabs the coordinates and automatically fills them in the sheet. And also show me the actual icon in the sheet so I can visualize it right away.
I'm searching for such a tool right now.
aganm said:
I'm searching for such a tool right now
I really don't know when the first beta release is planned but I know (because I was involved into development for some time) that this is exactly addressing what you want. Its original intention is to be a game design suite helping you to get your story written, manage assets and model the gameplay flow but such “databases” of interconnected content is part of the asset management
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