Grid Cartographer Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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 [i]have[/i] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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

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.