Brix Level Editor

About

Judging by the timestamp, this is probably one of the last BASIC programs I wrote.

My interest in Brix, the DOS game, was far from waining as the years went by. And despite being pretty ordinary at the game itself, and not being content with simply building something inspired by it, I set about seeing whether I could make my own levels. But before I could, I needed (or perhaps, wanted) to build some sort of a level editor.

And this is probably one of the rare times that I’ve successfully managed to reverse engineer the level format of a published game¹. Unlike games like Commander Keen, which used some basic compression algorithm, Brix had a fairly simple level format that was easy to manipulate and compare with what was shown on screen. After finding the details of how the playfield was encoded, plus all the other meta stuff like time limits and game element delays, I set about making the editor. Not content with just reading the level files, I also reverse engineered the tile data as well, which I used for the graphics and text boarders (no more cropping and saving tile graphics from screenshots).

Thus, the editor only works if the Brix assets are available. And it wasn’t in my best interest to spend time trying to remove this requirement. I might add that pressing Esc will get you back to the DOS prompt, should you be interested in doing so (wink, wink).

In all, this was probably the most polished level editor I made using QBasic (although there are still spelling errors everywhere). And like many other developers out there, I had more fun actually building the tool than I did making the levels. In fact, I can’t recall making a single level for Brix using this editor.