The game map

The actual environment and surroundings a player explores are just as important as the rest of the game. Without the world being present, the player is simply left spinning in an empty void of the screen clear color. Designing a good interface to bring out various parts of the game, ranging from the level backdrop to numerous hazards our player has to face can be tricky. Let's build a solid foundation for that right now, starting with defining what our map format is going to be like, as we take a look ahead to determine what we want to accomplish:

First, we want to specify a texture handle as the background. Then, we want to clearly define the map size and set up the gravity, which determines how fast entities fall to the ground. Additionally, we need to store the default friction, which determines how slippery the average tile is. The last property we want to store is the name of the next map that gets loaded when the end of the current map is reached. Here is a snippet from...