Super Mario Maker style level editor - best approach

Hello!

I am considering adding level editor to my game.

I then thought of the popular Super Mario Maker game where users can browse and share levels, and then rate them too. It would be an interesting approach.

What would be the best approach to do this for lowest money, that is still relatively safe to hack attacks?

I do not know PHP and SQL, however I have worked with installing and manually setting up Wordpress and doing backup routines.

I presume I would have to have a web server, some kind of php going on and sql database?

Or are there any services I can use of that is moderately priced and would be easier to use plus helping with the backend part of that part, keeping it relatively safe against hacker attacks.

I have really tried my best to google and search but the most results weren't good (mostly returning content about construct 2 instalation itself, sharing construct 2 developer side, how to login at forums here and so on)

I found a plugin for a service called Scribe but sadly Scribe has now changed so that the plugin isn't useful anymore.

This is just an question to see if it is a realistic approach for me to aim for someday in the future or if I should scrap the idea.

Thank you for reading.

I am bumping this now.

I have tried to go through some of rexrainbow's plugins for various services, such as Scribe and Backendless but most are either too expensive for me to try around at first or the plugin is just simply outdated.

Are there any plugin that are maintained and actually works?

i asked for help on level editors that are not just really basic crap often here and never got a suitable answer.

Theres one in the scirra store which i purchased but its not working anyways.

Best example was from a guy on patreon but that one is also missing the ability to save as file .

I was more asking for the server side of things. To be able to see people's work and all that.

The editor itself I am sure I will manage to make on my own.

My idea is to make an array to keep track of the tiles.

Save data to json file. Write the level width and height in tiles in separate fields.

Then take the array content and put it together into one string. (I figure you could use hexadecimal and keep to 2 character width per tile type and you have access to 255 different tiles)

And then to open it, you take that string, bite off 2 characters at one time to form the hexadecimal number and parse it back into the editor.

It is just an idea I have, but could be done differently. You could also analyse how TILED tmx level data looks like and do it like them.

oh well that in theory sounds very nice , maybe you can pass a proto over when you are ready . i never worked with these stuff so it would take me ages ^^

On the other hand , you say you mean the server side? What exactly you mean ?

If you want to "see peoples work" id suggest writing a quick PHP script that can store parsed textfiles (json) in a folder on your websever.

Then with your game being HTML5 you can use another PHP script to crawl through the stored level files on the server folder and display previews based on the json files so you could basically SEE the levels :D hope that makes sense to you.

Below is a dirty but working PHP code i used to do exactly this some years back :

$uploads_dir = './logs'; if ($_FILES["file"]["error"] == UPLOAD_ERR_OK) { $tmp_name = $_FILES["file"]["tmp_name"]; $name = $_FILES["file"]["name"]; move_uploaded_file($tmp_name, "$uploads_dir/$name".".txt");//Fix for security }

Since I posted my initial question/discussion starter I have stopped to focus on the developing part, maybe I wrote that? Well, so I am taking a break from that so I am not touching that for a while. So if you want proto, please try to do it yourself.

As for the server side thing, well with my stopped focus I will also wait with that, so I am going to study on this part later on when I am taking up time with the game again.

I can't code PHP or SQL so I want something that would take the whole backend thing done and updated without me worrying about safety and whatnot.

So the issue is to find a backend solution that is free to try out (have free low tier), that it has a supported and working plugin for C2* and, well..

*I know there's more alternatives for C3 but C2 is what I prefer to work with at the moment (due to me preferring its interface), sorry about that.

just play, don't try to mod by yourself :D

What do you mean?