Well how you edit your levels all depends on how you represent it. For example, if your "map" is a grid of tiles in a platform game that you can run and jump onto, like the old Super Mario Bros. games for example, then you would need an array of tiles values to represent what tiles fit into your entire game's play area. I recommend checking out Alexander Rosendal aka Travelers' game tutorials on his site. They make use of DelphiX though this is far from the standard these days. First check out the Tiles tutorial then How to create a platform game.
It's pretty good and gives you all the basics of how to program your own tiling system and then incorporate a player that can move about your created world and run into walls and jump up onto other platforms.
After that, if you want to read a bit more on 2D tiled game 'collision' you can check out the first issue of Pascal Gamer Magazine (free online magazine) in the Coder's Block section where Paul Nichols has an article on working with 2D tiled systems and collision detection. But don't read this first. First learn the basics by reading Alex's tutorials then you can learn the other tricks.
Bookmarks