Guide to Space Arena Ship Designer
Welcome to the guide to
Space Arena Ship Designer.
Space Arena Ship Designer is an editor to create ship layouts for the game
Space Arena.
When a design is finished, it can be submitted on either
Discord or
Reddit
for the developers to consider adding to the game.
If you know that the editor exists, you most likely already know what ships in the game look like. However,
I have
provided two examples just in case.
If you would like a tutorial on making art for ships,
here's a link to EnderRobo's ship art tutorial (Google Doc).
The first part of the editor is the grid. This is where you draw your design.
You have probably discovered that you can click or tap on this grid to fill in cells with gray.
Gray cells are regular, basic cells. You can change what type of cell you are drawing with either by
scrolling, or by using the cell selection menu in the upper right corner.
There are 12 cell types to select from, as well as the empty cell. The cell selection menu will tell you
what kind of cell is currently selected.
There are four cell fill modes. The default mode is single select, which allows you to fill in one cell at a time.
You can also click and drag to draw lines of cells, though this doesn't work well on mobile.
You can change what type of fill mode you want to use by clicking one of the four mode icons.
In addition to single select, you have options for
- Rectangle select: Allows you to draw and fill a rectangular area.
- Circle select: Allows you to draw and fill a circular area.
- Free form select: Allows you to draw and fill weird shapes.
You can click and drag to draw a wavy line, or create straight lines by using individual clicks.
In addition to these, you have two modifiers that alter the behavior of your selected fill mode.
Neither of these have any affect on single select. However, they modify all other fill modes.
The Inverted Selection option will cause you to select every cell that is NOT surrounded by your fill area.
The Edges Only option will only select the edges of your defined area. Or, if invertion is also on, will select
everything but the edges.
Around the grid there are several additional controls.
In the upper left corner is your scaling control.
This allows you to zoom in and out of the grid in order to see more of it at a time.
On each side of the grid, there is a small box with three controls.
In each box, there is an arrow control. This allows you to move the grid of cells around on your screen.
There is a protection to prevent you from moving the entire grid out of view and losing it.
Next to the arrow is a plus symbol. Clicking this will add a new row or column of empty cells to that side of the grid.
The minus symbol does the opposite, removing the outermost row or column from that side.
You can also add and remove rows and columns to the middle of the grid. Select the Single Select fill mode and
move your cursor to the edge of the grid. A plus or minus icon will pop up and allow you to add or remove a column or row of cells.
At the bottom of the editor is a small bar labelled "Show cell counts".
Clicking this will open the Cell Counts info bar. This uses an algorithm to count up the number of each
category of cells are used in your ship.
If you are confused by the counts, don't worry. These are more for the developers than you.
There are several other controls in the upper right corner.
The rightmost control is a button labelled "Center". Clicking this will move your grid so that it is centered on your screen.
To the left of this are the undo and redo controls. These are slightly bugged, but you can use these to undo past actions.
You can also use the key combinations ctrl+z for undo and ctrl+shift+z for redo.
The final control is the "File" button. Clicking this will open the save/open menu.
There are four sections to the menu. The first is "new". This will allow you to create a new grid with your desired dimensions.
The second section is "open". This has two options. The first, labelled "browse" opens your file explorer to import a .shipdesign file.
It will also accept .txt and .json files, though these aren't used very much.
Under the browse button is a second option labelled "input JSON". This will open a giant text box you can type in.
The JSON menu is mostly for development purposes. JSON is a format for storing data as text. The JSON for a light fighter looks like this:
[[0,0,0,1,0],[1,1,1,1,3],[0,0,0,1,0]]
The third section, "save project", has a single option. This option downloads a .shipdesign file containing the data for your ship.
This allows you to come back to finish your ship later, or share an incomplete design for others to work on.
The final section, "save image", will show an image of your design, along with an option to download the image.
This is used to submit the finished design to Reddit or Discord.