A general data/content editor for BRUTAL games (early, planned community release)

[Tyler McCauley]

Hi all,

I’ve been building a set of authoring tools on BRUTAL for my own projects (a space sim and a tactics/RPG prototype). They’ve grown into something general enough that I’d like to give them back to the community once they’re ready, so I’m sharing early to get feedback.

What it is

An ImGui editor, built on BRUTAL’s ImGui and Vulkan bindings, for game data kept as JSON files described by JSON Schemas. You point it at a data folder and a schema folder and get a full editing workspace, with no code needed:

• Panels: an outliner, a table and an inspector for every list in your data.
• Checks: every edit is checked against the schema, and you can plug in your game’s own rules too. Invalid values are refused with a reason before they reach disk.
• Undo and safe saving: undo/redo; saves never overwrite a file another program changed; unchanged formatting is preserved, so diffs stay small.
• Repair mode: fixes a file that no longer fits its schema, one edit at a time.
• Links between files: a small “link map” says which fields name items in other files. You can follow a link, see what refers to an item, and spot links that point at nothing.
• File management: create files from a schema, rename and delete them, with link counts shown first.
• Command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and full keyboard use.
• AI and scripting access: a command line and an MCP server let scripts or AI assistants make the same edits under the same rules.

Games plug in, they don’t fork it

Game-specific behaviour (extra rules, read-only files, custom panels, play modes) lives in an optional adapter DLL. As a test of that, there’s a small checkers game made entirely through the public seams:

• the board is edited as data;
• you can play it inside the editor;
• “Play in its own window” launches the standalone game on the position you’re editing.

Where it’s at

• Windows, self-contained zip, with a sample project and a one-page start guide.
• About 3,000 automated tests; the UI is tested headless by rendering frames and driving keys and clicks.
• Early: the API will still change, and it hasn’t had many people on it yet.
• It’ll be released under the same licence as BRUTAL itself.

What I’d love to hear

• Would this be useful for your project? What does your game’s data look like?
• What would you need from it first: a scene/level editor, asset import, something else?
• Anyone interested in trying an early build?

Thanks!