One of the downsides to being a programmer is that I don’t often have anything visual to show off like my comrades of the artistic persuasion. There’s not really anything groundbreaking happening behind the scenes with the programming, either, so writing about the programming process isn’t particularly interesting. But this is one of those rare occasions when I do have something to show.

One of the major challenges of moving away from RPG Maker is that I no longer had a visual editor to define things like party members, items, and enemies. Until now, I’ve been hardcoding them directly in the game, but I’m finally reaching the point where it’s just too much of a hassle to do as a result of the increasing complexity of the codebase.

To that end, I’ve begun building Worldweaver.



It’s still pretty bare-bones and an early work in progress, but it’s an application I’m building to aid in the entity creation process. So far, I’ve finished the first three tabs (save for some minor bugs).

Worldweaver was built using Windows Forms and links directly into Metis and VSA, from where it’s able to draw entity definitions (say, the list of skill effects) and update the editor dynamically to reflect changes in the code.



I’ve spent about three days working on it so far and it has already paid for itself in terms of time spent versus time saved. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but so far it’s shaping up to be pretty helpful.