RobOS Tabletop Blockmap Creator

Blockmap Creator turns a picture of a board into data the game can use. You line a square grid up with the artwork, mark which tiles are corridor floor, and outline the rooms. The geometry it writes is the fixed part of a map. Quest content (furniture, doors, monsters, notes) belongs to the cartridge and is edited in Tabletop Studio.

Use it

1. Pick a Board Preset or click Open Image…. The presets are HeroQuest First Light Side A, HeroQuest Classic Stone Dungeon, First Light Side B and Fan Cavern Citadel. PNG, JPG, WebP and BMP images work.
2. In Calibration, set Tile Size (px) (steps of 1 and 0.1), Offset X and Offset Y (steps of 1 and 5) so the grid lines match the artwork. Set the grid columns and rows, or leave them on Auto. The status bar shows the image size and grid size, for example “1014 x 738 px” and “26 x 19 grid”.
3. Choose a tool: Select (pan), Corridor with Toggle, Paint or Erase, Room, or Erase. For rooms, Rectangle takes a drag box and Free Form lets you click tiles and confirm with OK. Undo and Redo are available. Pan with middle-click or Space and drag, and zoom with the scroll wheel.
4. Edit each room’s name, id, quadrant (NW, NE, SW, SE, Center) and shape in the Active Room panel. The View Layers section toggles the image, grid lines, coordinates, corridors and rooms and sets their opacity.
5. Click Save Board Map to write the map into a cartridge. Or use Export JSON to save it to a file, or Copy JSON to copy it.

Save Board Map updates the maps entry of games/tabletop-rpg/cartridges/<slug>.cartridge.json (width, height, rooms, doors, wall blocks, starting stair, calibration, background image) and keeps the rest of that map’s data. The cartridge file must already exist.

Launch options

The app is part of a repository checkout and reads games/tabletop-rpg for boards (assets/boards) and cartridges. Start it with:

./games/tabletop-rpg/blockmap-creator.sh                      # default: first_light_dungeon.png
./games/tabletop-rpg/blockmap-creator.sh heroquest_board.png  # a specific board image
./games/tabletop-rpg/blockmap-creator.sh --cartridge=heroquest-fortress-fire-king

npm start in packages/tabletop-blockmap-creator also works, and the package has a launch.sh that finds an Electron binary. A --map=<image> flag opens an image directly. npm test runs node --test tests/*.test.js.