notimetoplay/ascii-mapper

Map editor for tile-based games using ASCII characters

ASCII Mapper

Ever needed a map editor for a tile-based game, but found most of them too complicated and/or specific? ASCII Mapper allows you to paint the same using the characters on your keyboard instead of graphics. That's it: just a grid of symbols you can load easily in code and interpret however you want.

Other ASCII art editors exist. This one differs from them in two big ways:

1. It uses square tiles, so you can estimate distances well.
2. It doesn't deal in color, to keep it abstract and distraction-free.

ASCII Mapper started out as a quick-and-dirty online prototype. As of 17 August 2019, there's also a desktop version offering more features.

But how will I know what all the symbols mean?

Why, they mean whatever you want them to. It's your game, and your maps.

That said, games in the roguelike genre have established certain conventions you might want to follow, to avoid having to make up your own:

. is the default, empty floor
, is a marked floor that stands out in some way
: is impassable terrain
; is another type of impassable terrain
# is a wall
~ is water
| is a column, pole or tree trunk
^ is a mountain or pine tree
" is a bush or foliage of some sort
+ is a closed door
/ is an open door
= is a wooden plank, table or crate
< is a staircase going up
> is a staircase going down

You can also use any other character on the keyboard; just press any key you want to set the brush. For instance, I've used "*" to mean a fountain or basin, and "&" to mean a statue.

Limitations

ASCII Mapper handles maps of up to 100x100. You can't fit much more in a reasonably-sized browser window anyway, even at minimum zoom. The desktop version puts the map in a scrollable viewport, but even then it can only handle so many tiles at once before it becomes too slow.

ascii-mapper's Issues

Select and move a region of the map

Select a rectangular map region and move that region to another part of the map. Copy, cut and paste as well.

Brush Sizes

Sometimes you want to carve out a two tile wide hall or make a wide river. Being able to have a larger brush would save time. It also doubles as an eraser.

Fill

A fill feature would be nice. Basically, replace one symbol with another symbol for all adjacent symbols.

Basic shape tools

Shape tools like rectangle, circle, line, etc would be very useful. Especially useful for making rooms.

Map sizes when loading a map

Should the map size adjust to the size of the loaded map? For example. if you load a map that is 40x40 and the current map is 25x25 you lose everything over 25 rows or columns.

That means I need to know my map dimensions and resize the current editor map before I load a map from an external file. That is tedious.

Drawing on a scrolled section of the map puts the symbols in the wrong location

For example, make a 100x100 map that requires the scroll bars, scroll to the bottom right corner and draw, nothing will show up but if you scroll up to the top right section of the map you will see the edits.

It's like the relative window coordinates are being translated into global map coordinates

Undo and Redo

Some form of undo and redo.

River tool

A line tool that adds some randomness to the line's path so the like isn't straight. Useful for quickly drawing a river or some hills.