Hexographer "Features"

With the scare quotes in the title, I almost expect this post to be about bugs I've found in Hexographer. I've found one, and filed a bug report, but that's not important right now.

What I have done in the above map is tidy up some bits that were annoying me, bits of walls that hook up with actual terrain pieces. It occurred to me that I can add these in as an extra graphical layer that make the map look correct, without having any change to the underlying behavior.

It turns out, Hexographer has this same notion; there's a "terrain" type that a hex can have, and then hexes can have zero, one, (or many?) features. The little connecty bits adjacent to the doors, above, are features. You may not be able to read it, but there are hexes tagged as "Retreat" and hexes tagged as "Spawn".

I started off using Hexographer as a convenient place to screw around with my hex tiles, and as I've moved along, it seems like it's going to be a workable level editor for the November game.

Towards that end, I've started looking at the .hxm file that I've been saving out, and it's plaintext and easily parseable. There's a section of the file that describes all the hex types available, and then there's a list of hexes, with what kind of terrain and features.

I'm not sure if the level I've been working with, above, is actually going to make it in to the game, or if it's just a test, but it's got most of what I need. I think the next thing to do is to work on taking the .hxm file and turn it into a format that I can use at runtime, and begin making a game in this level.