Children edit Wesnoth maps for fun
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SynrG
Children edit Wesnoth maps for fun
Two of my younger children, a 9 year old boy and a 6 year old girl, have been playing with wesnoth-editor a bit. To them, producing a playable map isn't the primary goal. They seem to use the editor as another paint tool, but one which engages their imaginations in a different way than a paint tool that allows freehand drawing. Drawing is, itself, the goal. And if they can play with the result, that's just icing on the cake.
Of course, wesnoth-editor is by no means done, and we noticed some of its obvious faults right away. Crashing when saving your map is a bit of a downer, and some funny things happening with scaling ("smearing" of the terrain chooser) were a bit distracting. Nevertheless, it is already at the point where they can have some fun with it. It just needs to be polished up a bit.
Level editors are not new to them. The game Rocks'n'Diamonds has long been a favourite. If people here are thinking of helping push the current level editors forward, either Dave's C++ version, sparky's python/pygtk version, or perhaps some other that might have escaped my notice, please try this level editor out. I have observed from watching my children use it (from ages 5 up through 13) that it is both usable and fun.
I think part of the appeal to my children of the Rocks'n'Diamonds editor is the ability to try out the results right away. While an integrated editor is one way to do this, a cheap way to implement this in the current editors is to simply have a way to launch Wesnoth from the editor using the newly edited map. Of course, a more usable (for accomplished Wesnoth players/scenario designers) editor would also have some way of placing arbitrary units anywhere in the map at the start of the test session, but that could always come later.
Anyway, I just wanted to let the Wesnoth community know that there is demand for an editor in a new and very young population of Wesnoth users, in case that helps spur on some more development action.
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SynrG <SynrG at debian dot org>
Of course, wesnoth-editor is by no means done, and we noticed some of its obvious faults right away. Crashing when saving your map is a bit of a downer, and some funny things happening with scaling ("smearing" of the terrain chooser) were a bit distracting. Nevertheless, it is already at the point where they can have some fun with it. It just needs to be polished up a bit.
Level editors are not new to them. The game Rocks'n'Diamonds has long been a favourite. If people here are thinking of helping push the current level editors forward, either Dave's C++ version, sparky's python/pygtk version, or perhaps some other that might have escaped my notice, please try this level editor out. I have observed from watching my children use it (from ages 5 up through 13) that it is both usable and fun.
I think part of the appeal to my children of the Rocks'n'Diamonds editor is the ability to try out the results right away. While an integrated editor is one way to do this, a cheap way to implement this in the current editors is to simply have a way to launch Wesnoth from the editor using the newly edited map. Of course, a more usable (for accomplished Wesnoth players/scenario designers) editor would also have some way of placing arbitrary units anywhere in the map at the start of the test session, but that could always come later.
Anyway, I just wanted to let the Wesnoth community know that there is demand for an editor in a new and very young population of Wesnoth users, in case that helps spur on some more development action.
--
SynrG <SynrG at debian dot org>