These are the editors we have made to create Awesomenauts (PS3/360/PC/Mac). Their features and possibilities are best shown using a little video I made of them:

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We made our previous game Swords & Soldiers with hardly any tools (level editing was done in Notepad!), so we really wanted to step up the quality and workflow up here.

These tools are part of our own engine and we keep using and improving them for our future games. The core target here was quick iteration, so most tools are in the game itself, and can be used while playing at the same time.

The editors were made over the course of four years, mostly by interns. I made the core components of the in-game editors myself, but from there our interns Ted, Niels, Bart, Thijs, Eric and Rick worked on them to really turn them into a useful and rich toolset.

Our editors have a ton of features, including:

• Game can be played while editing
  
• Several artists/designers can edit the same level at the same time over the network, seeing each other's edits in real-time
  
• Complete undo/redo
  
• Everything is animateable
  
• Edits to animations or particles are immediately reflected during actual gameplay
  
• Graphics look exactly the same on all platforms, so artists can comfortably work on their PC and don't need to use the more laborious console devkits
  
• AI debugger
  
  
  Having the editors in the game does have its downsides. Gameplay code is more complex because editor and game are so intertwined. Another issue is that everything needs to be able to be updated at any time, which makes some optimisations impossible. Building our editors this way definitely cost us some performance, but with a lot of optimisation work I did manage to get proper framerate: Awesomenauts now mostly runs on 60fps on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and rather old PCs can still run it fluently.
  
  For more info on these editors, please have a look at this blogpost: http://joostdevblog....f-ronitech.html
  
  Click here to view the iotd

Very cool -- looks like a very big step up from creating your levels with notepad!

That. Is very damn impressive. So much is that? Free? Free + (x * 100)?

Wow, that's the kind of tools any engine developer dreams of making! Good on you! (I haven't tried them; are they integrated into the game, or are they one other, or several other applications)

Thanks! Most of these tools are integrated with the game, but they are turned off in the release version, because the game is purely a multiplayer game and we don't have proper systems for handling user mods in combination with the online multiplayer. (That would require handling things like players trying to play the same level, while they have different versions of that level. Possible to make, of course, but a lot of work to get all of the intricacies right!)

Whoa, it looks so awesome!