Firstly, I apologize if I have not posted the under the correct topic. “Newbie & Debugging Questions” seemed the appropriate place, as I am Newbie and am unsure of the difficulty of this question.
I will try to frame the question as cleanly as I can:
Suppose that I have decided to create a game in which each level has been designed in advance; that is, drawn out on paper with colored markers or by some other method. These levels were designed in the aforedescribed manner by an artist, or someone with no regard whatsoever for the difficulty of implementing a particular design in code (I do not mean to offend any artists here). My question is this: Does there exist any sort of file format that works with some other utility to easily store representations of a designed “terrain” or “level”? More specifically does such a format and utility exist that is an improvement over the “brute force” method of specifying some “draw” and “render” function to create each level on a pixel by pixel basis with hard coded coordinates and things like that? Or is such a format and utility something that is typically implemented from the ground up by individual game programmers to meet there specific requirements? Also I will add: (Because maybe someone will find it useful for the question) I am mostly set on using Slick2D as a game engine for my project.