Grid Cartographer

Excellent!

My gameplay time for this game may be low at the time of review, but I have actually purchased Grid Cartographer v.2 and v.3 in the past. With that in mind, I only recently found out about v.4.

GC v.4 appears to have kept all the old features that made it so wonderful, such as an extremely uncomplicated but reasonably powerful system. You can also import lots of custom assets, if you have the time and inclination.

I personally use GC for creating my maps for my online Virtual Tabletop game. I am getting burned out from the amount of prep work involved for making my own maps using other software (like DungeonDraft or Inkarnate), so it is like a breath of fresh air to make effective maps quickly. This product does what it says on the tin: You make maps out of grids, lol. I loved the improved features, like the wand tool. I am happy to see the original developer has kept working so hard on this amazing product!

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about programming, so I cannot comment on the new GC professional game developer mode,

I saw an earlier review stating that the price may turn you off. I completely understand that and I paused for a moment before buying it. Honestly, I knew at least some of what I was getting into and it was my favorite mapping software back in the day.

I'd recommend purchasing if you want to make simple but effective maps quickly.

Convenient tool the asking price could be a turn off I know for me it was for a long time, but its updated pretty frequently great for making dungeons for TTRPGS or for mapping out old games.

A must for all old-school rpg-players and aspiring developers alike.

I've been using this for years. Probably more than a decade now. By far one of the most flexible and easy to use tools. Always happy to support an independent developer.

If you're into old-school grid-based RPGs and like to do the mapping yourself, it's a great program to use for that, and it has some features and conveniences that you wouldn't be able to get from just using an Excel spreadsheet—much more convenient options for showing doors, the ability to rotate your entire map if you've got "north" facing the wrong way, the ability to run an emulator window inside the program, and so on. The price might be a bit of a turn-off for some people, but it does go on sale from time to time.

There are a few little features I wouldn't mind seeing in the future (for instance, the ability to quickly shift a map in such a way that, for instance, the top row wraps back around to the bottom of a region and everything else shifts up—the sort of thing one might want to do for a map for a dungeon that wraps around on itself), but overall, there's a lot here, and the developer is still working on it (albeit slowly, although the Twitter account suggests that there's been some work on it behind the scenes).

Grid Cartographer really has what i expected. But it also has some things i find disappointing. Here are my pros & cons for this tool:

PROS
-It is a powerful grid-based map making tool. It can be used to make maps for dungeon crawlers and metroidvanias.
-The workspace has unlimited boundaries, so like no boundaries at all.
-The toolset is moderate, but not too big. You can use plenty of tools without getting confused because there are too much tools.
-It's easy to pick up and easy to master.
-You can import custom tiles & markers.

CONS
-For a tool of this quality, 46 Euro's (kinda equal to 46 Dollars) is a bit too expensive. If you want a good map making tool for not more than what it's worth, look for something else.
-The map styles are limited. You can only use a small number of styles. You also can't edit the styles, so kinda disappointing...

I would reccomend this tool if you want a map making software of moderate quality (and if you're not as greedy as Scrooge McDuck or Mr Crabs).

This is a fantastic piece of software. I was hesitant given the price, but it has quickly turned into one of my favorite Steam purchases. It has breathed new life into so many old games on top of being just a super nice piece of digital graph paper. In fact, I spent several days just plotting out dungeons like a 13 year old in detention.

Seriously, if you play a lot of dungeon crawlers or enjoy building dungeons on graph paper for whatever reason, this is a no brainier. I can't say enough good things about it.

It does well what is says it will do and a little bit more. What more can you ask for? The portability, the customization, the ease of use? All there. It's a great tool for what it is, and even for what it's not.

Perfect for mapping old RPG´s that don´t have in-game automap. Very useful if you don´t want to use the classic graph paper & pencil combo. The price is a bit high though - especially if you are not interested in the game dev. features.

A great little map maker for all you TTRPG nerds out there. A bit pricey when not on sale, but GC4 apparently goes on sale during each summer and winter sale.

Great for assisting in the mapping of old CRPGs such as Wizardry and Might and Magic as well as making tabletop RPG maps. There's even features to assist game developers, which I haven't dove into. This is the most comprehensive and easy-to-use grid map-making program that I've found. The price may seem steep, but specialized as it is, it's very much worthwhile.
If you've been using Photoshop or something other non-specialized tool to create your maps, you may find this product to be a boon to your workflow.

Grid Cartographer is an excellent piece of software for anyone wanting to quickly make maps for games or tabletop. As someone who is experimenting with making a first person dungeon crawl, GC has been instrumental in prototyping a map to export into the engine. The ability to walk around the map with an avatar during building makes this process really quite easy to visualize, too.

Unfortunately I cannot speak towards the Game Link functionality, as my primary use for the tool has been geared towards cartography of my own rather than mapping out games.

Also, if this information is useful to anyone, I have gotten Grid Cartographer 2022.5 to work on a Linux machine via Proton. The initial setup took a little bit (before installing you set the Proton version you want to use in the game's Properties panel) but it seems to run flawlessly for my purposes (as a map editor) even on a custom firmware Chromebook with 4GB RAM... though do expect the combined installation to take a chunk of disk space specifically for Proton.

The tools are great, but IMO it's a bit too expensive for map designing purpose.

A really awesome product for mapping old RPGs.

I have been playing games with the Game Link feature and it really is a great way to experience older games.

Essential for Godot or Unity games development. GC automates substantial portions of level creation. The number of useful features is too numerous to mention, but some of my favourites include support for both blocks, hexes and edge-mapping and putting notes inside objects so that when they're exported as a JSON they can be read as labels. The fact that it is still being supported and updated makes this the best tool you can use. Easy to use with high-end features. Highly recommended for both developers, game jammers, CRPG modders and even TRPG fans!

Developer is responsive on Discord and provides regular updates to the software. It works great! I got it to use with old Dosbox games to help me map them, and I never had any problems. There was one time I couldn't figure out how to do something but the developer assisted me through the discord. I highly recommend this software to anyone who would have a use for it.

This software is very good. TBH I am not using it that much for what it is meant for (i.e. mapping out old school RPGs). It is good for that, no worries there! Personally I am using it to design and map out my D&D campaign as a DM. I really like it. Especially nowadays with online gaming, giving a FPS view of dungeons and so on, super useful and good! The creator is constantly updating it, and I have rarely (if ever?) seen bugs.

It is the perfect application for drawing maps of dungeons in various CRPGS where an auto mapping function is not available and if you lack graph paper to do the maps on. The various options also allow the budding game designer to design their own dungeons for a pet project.

Grid Cartographer is a useful multi-purpose tool. It can be used to draw all sorts of maps for tabletop RPGs and games, to provide auto-mapping functions for a set of older RPGs that don't provide them, and as a game development tool, to lay out levels. (A Vaporum dev posted a screenshot recently that showed them laying out a dungeon for the sequel in GC4.)

I use it mainly for game development. The game I am working on has tile-based maps, and the editor quickly and easily imports tile sheets, allows you to work with maps of any size, and allows the placement of annotations on a per-square basis.

Then there's exporting your data. The possibilities it offers for this are pretty incredible; there's a default XML output that is perfectly fine, but if you really want to get things just so, you can write up your own scripts. The scripts run in essentially a tiny virtual computer, like using an old 8086 DOS machine with a CGA display. They can be quick command-line jobs, or there is an API for making character-based GUIs, or you can use ANSI encoding, or you can completely roll your own by poking character and attribute values directly into the display RAM.

The game I'm working on now has scripts that can be assigned to a range of cells on the map, tagged as to their use. I've written an editor for these scripts that automatically creates new, empty scripts when I add a script note on the map, saves local files, and manages exporting new maps and scripts into my project's directory. I can switch over to GC4, edit a map, export it, and bounce back to Godot and see the changes pretty much immediately. Because of the flexibility of the scripting, I can do pretty much anything map-related in GC4, even if the functionality isn't built into the app itself. All of the APIs are documented on the GC website.

Also, the developer is incredibly responsive with help and to suggestions, and very much wants to support users of all types. He's implemented a couple of APIs so I could make my toolset do what I wanted it to do, which is pretty amazing.

GC4 is one of the best development-related purchases I've made in a long time.

(PS: someone please tell me to stop messing about with the port of Rogue I've been working on for the GC4 console. Please?)

Been using Grid Cartographer 3 while making my first game and it drastically improved my productivity. Planned to buy GC4 as a thank you to the developer, but after using it for a few hours I'm blown away by new features and quality-of-life improvements.

As a long-time user, I can't recommend it enough.

Perfect for creating small or even huge environments. I use this tool for helping me out in games because of my poor memory and it forces me to take my time and enjoy the maps of the game. Very nice to have for developing maps for either 2-D or 3-D dungeon crawlers. While the price might turn down some people, I think it is definitely worth it for the possibilities that comes with this tool. While I haven't used it yet, there is also scripting support, which can be great if you need to tweak something to be able to use the maps you make in certain situations. Overall, I think this is the best professional grid based map making tool and I do recommend it if you can afford its price.

GC 4 works well, and I find it very useful as a tool for my own software development. The developer is VERY responsive, and when I inquired about a feature that it turned out was not supported, he added that functionality and posted an update within a matter of a few days!!!! You can't beat that.