Organize scenes like a map

irock

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  • Posts: 2891
While designing Reaching Finality, I ran into a big issue with my dungeon. There's no good way to organize my scenes. I have to open several scenes sometimes to actually find the one I'm looking for.


They're not laid out in a way that makes sense. They're listed alphabetically.


What if you could manually organize them like you would a map?


Better yet, what if you could organize them like you would a map and draw lines between them?

Basically, you would optionally be able to freely drag them around like you would design mode blocks and possibly draw straight lines, or even tell it what two scenes you want the lines to be drawn between and it'll do it automatically. It would work with folders too.

Also, the scene thumbnails are useless. It would be better if it automatically zoomed out to capture a big portion of the scene rather than a small portion of the top left corner of my view when I save my game.

I think the current way of doing things is horrible for games with nonlinear scene progression. The world in my game, The Binding Force, is going to be really big and open, and I'm not looking forward to trying to find the scenes I'm looking for later on.

Ceric

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  • Posts: 610
Awesome idea. I think this idea has come up a few times before, but I like this take on it.

GreenGuy

  • Posts: 101
that would be very handy in my game too!!! Renewal
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Jon

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  • Posts: 17524
I like this a lot.

Sunflower

  • Posts: 591
I like that idea a lot, too!

If there was not only zoom out preview rather than top-left one, but also an option to change dimensions of individual scene preview (e.g. a double-arrow thingy would appear when you roll over right or bottom edge of scene preview), that would be wicked! Imagine making a Metroidvania game where dimensions of scenes vary, and an ability to adjust preview sizes to scene sizes, to later arrange them in a Metroidvania-esque map!
(perhaps in such case it would be a good idea to have an option of turning off displaying scene names, since they would only be a bother? O.o')

Also, option of snapping scenes to grid would be nice as well! ;)

twotimingpete

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  • Posts: 1667
I like this a lot.

I like this a lot, too, and it seems to go hand in hand with what we were talking about the other day -- making the stencyl resources more windows-like.

Hectate

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  • Posts: 4643
This idea reminds me of how Twine lets you drag around the text boxes to map or organize them.
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