CHAPTER 22
A SIMPLE GAME EDITOR IN C#

by Mike McShaffry

Assembling the thousands of assets needed for a game is not a job for Visual Studio. Instead, the 3D models, shaders, textures, scripts, audio files, and other data are typically assembled in a game editor. Sometimes called a level editor, this tool manages the assets, creates a great environment for game designers to practice their craft, and ultimately packages everything into a form that the game engine can consume.

One of the most popular game editors, the Unreal Editor, allows its users to have control over things like lighting, scripted camera control, shader creation, and basic geometry placement. Let’s not forget about saving and loading the levels, which is also pretty important. Some editors allow you to view animations on characters, while other engines break things like that into separate tools. For our purposes, we want to make sure that our editor handles the most essential task for a level editor—adding objects to our level, adjusting its properties, and saving the level to a file.