Thursday 12 September 2013

Super Meat Boy Editor - Miscellanous Experiementation

As of recently I've been messing around with Super Meat Boy Editor just to try something new and to keep my design skills up to scratch.


You can watch a video of what I made here: link
I’m quickly going to discuss the functionality of the editor and why I think it is a good design exercise for any beginner designer to take advantage of.


What's good about it 
Testing capabilities
The editor is really nice at prototyping any ideas for a cool level that you may have. Pressing ‘F1’ jumps back and forth into play mode and dev mode. You can also move the spawn point of Meat Boy by pressing ‘B’ which proves extremely handy in skipping areas to test a specific section of the level.
Limitations
As a designer the limitations that the editor features prove an excellent design exercise in further developing one’s ability to make a fun and solid playable level.

What's bad about it
Saving
Saving levels seems a bit shady, I’ve only been using it for a couple of days now and I haven’t been able to load any of my existing levels which I’ve saved before. They probably still exist somewhere on my pc in the editor file location, but as of yet I haven’t been able to locate these files. I’ll spend some time looking into this and hopefully resolve this issue.
Uploading
Unfortunately you can upload your levels to the Super Meat Boy world due to it being hacked shortly after its release.
All the bad points aside, the editor is only a beta. However I do think it allows for some really awesome design practises for those who are just starting out in level design who haven’t yet written their own editors. In addition to presenting a nice framework to build upon and improve for those who are writing their own level editors.

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