Doing it by hand

Jetblade's big shtick, of course, is procedural content generation. But that's no reason to keep people from being able to make their own maps. Once the game is complete, you should be able to make your own fully-fledged world for other players to explore. And an integral part of being able to do that is the addition of a map editor.



I won't bore you with a guide to how to use the editor, because the new in-game console (courtesy of Pygame-Console) contains an overview:



In contrast to last update's major refactoring of the TerrestrialObject code, which involved a lot of work and didn't create any particularly visible changes, this time around we have many very visible changes without very much work. The actual modification of a map while the game is running just amounts to a couple of very simple function calls, so most of the work in making the map editor was at the interface level. The input processing system, for example, got refactored and is now quite easy to work with (not that it was used at all before now; previously it'd been a holdover from a previous project). All that remained was finding Pygame-Console and integrating it into Jetblade, which wasn't very hard at all.



Of course, the map editor still has a long way to go. You can't place background props or environmental effects with it yet, and there are plenty of planned game features that need to be added that it will of course have to take into account, like enemy placement, powerups, scripted events, and so on. However, the groundwork has been placed.