Why build a world builder at all. do you even have any idea of how you intend to store any of this data to be convenient to use for your game, let alone an editing program?

do you understand the underlying intricasies of a 2d tile based engine at all yet? why not understand all that before you build a GUI world builder.

The reason I suggest this approach is that while you may make the most wonderful editor in existance, you are probably going to be prone to kitchen sinking it and then what.. you now have to build an engine that supports everything possible in your world builder.

Try defining what you really want to make as a game first. Think about what features you would like to support within the game and lock that list as best you can. Then you can build your data system for the world. Then you have a common data/resource library for either game engine to load or worldbuilder to use.

then you can build your woldbuilder interfaces to allow you to manipulate the game data within the bounds of the feature set you want/need.

These other posters are correct though, you will need to start small when making the worldbuilder windows to start with.

I think the biggest question is what is your goal? to become proficient at making windowed apps in java or to make a 2d tile based game.

Thread deleted.

Hmm..

Thread deleted.

Don't really know what this guy is talking about. I was banned for disagreeing with 3 other people who repeatedly told everyone that it costs $100,000 to dig a hole in your backyard, and that the title is that to make ANY game, even a small one, an android app, or ANYTHING at all, it costs $100,000 minimum. When I tried to explain to people that if you spend $0 on developing something, it is free. One of the moderators disagreed with me, and I told him he had no idea what he was talking about. An hour later, I was banned by that moderator for disagreeing with him. Just wanted to make sure I didn't get a bad rep from this kid saying I "continuously start arguments that rarely had any relevance." Especially given the topic I was banned for was specifically titled "It costs $100,000 to develop any game." including a program it takes you 1 day to write (somehow).

So you missed the point in order to be pedantic? Looks to me like jonbonazza knows exactly what he's talking about.

This also happened about 6 months ago, so to bring up this, incorrectly my name "Emergeance",[/quote]

A typo, presumably.

and to mention Unity Forums at all (which are quite a joke...) is just strange indeed.[/quote]

The internet has this nasty habit of not forgetting things.

Yes, I've made a tile based game before, although I decided it was better for me to start over to make it slightly better.[/quote]

So start over and make it better. Except this time, instead of focusing on the actual gameplay from square one, focus on having something that can be fully tested at every step. Add an interface that lets you god-mode change the actual tile contents. The next thing you know, you have your editor.

I am very curious as to why someone is assumed knowledge-less just because they are asking for helping starting a project,[/quote]

Er... because knowledgeable people, by definition, could get themselves started?

and asking for any helpful books on game programming design, as opposed to game design or programming language.[/quote]

I'm afraid you'll find there aren't any, or at least anything pretending to be will be gimmicky and not good.

Programming is programming. Game design is game design. When you make a game, you do both. There are some idioms and tricks, but they aren't hard to pick up, make sense immediately to experienced programmers, and generally aren't worth filling up a whole book with. Well-written code is well-written code, whether it's code for a game or for anything else; and roughly the same principles are applied in evaluating and improving code quality.

Thread deleted.

Thread closed.

Thread deleted.

Programming is programming. Game design is game design. When you make a game, you do both. There are some idioms and tricks, but they aren't hard to pick up, make sense immediately to experienced programmers, and generally aren't worth filling up a whole book with. Well-written code is well-written code, whether it's code for a game or for anything else; and roughly the same principles are applied in evaluating and improving code quality.[/quote]

I respectfully disagree with the highlighted portion. It's not at all easy to transition from an intermediate level programmer to a game designer. Even experienced programmers might find this transition hard, because basically the concepts behind programming games are totally different from general programming principles learnt in schools, colleges, at work and through books. There are too many things to learn and the process is overwhelming to say the least.

Game programming is a separate field in itself. I think there is a knowledge gap which is not addressed by a lot of books which purport to do this. Which is true to some extent.