It's hard to not take the M in MVP too seriously...
But I have to take it seriously...
I've broken into MVP 1, MVP 2, etc..
* I suspect HTML5 Canvas is the easiest tool that would get the job done - I mention this because in my mind, I know the limitations of Canvas, and I think they line up quite while with what I'm imagining. It's possible something else could be easier to start with, but might not be able to easily implement ALL of these features I've laid out... But I think it's possible to get started with just CSS. [1]
* An open source and easily appended list of tile families and their descriptors (size of tiles, positions of them, etc.) and the link to their licensing
* Let you pick a tile family
* Let you select a tile as your current brush - every click places a tile
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* Select an eraser that deletes tiles that you click within
* Pick the background to use (such as parchment [respect their licensing, too], or just solid colors)
* Select a tool to move existing tiles by clicking within them, dragging them
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* A way to filter tile families (and backgrounds) by licensing ("show me only CC0", "show CC0 or CCBY3.0 etc.")
* change the size of your image map
* image map can be bigger than your browser window (with scrolling)
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* Change the size of the tiles you are about to paint
* Change the color of the tiles you are about to paint
* Change the opacity of the tiles you are about to paint
* Change the rotation of the tiles you are about to paint
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* Pick a font, size, color, bold, italic
* Type text
* The Eraser can delete text
* The Mover can move text
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* The Eraser can also drag through things to erase them
* Turn on and off a grid to snap tiles to
* Save as JSON button (x, y, tile id)
* Load from JSON button
* Save as Image button (otherwise people can use a screen scraper themselves)
* The image is a PNG which has the JSON encoded in it as EXIF so it's easy to restore and continue
Right on. So it seems like you want a tilemap editor that includes a lot of assets from permissively licensed content?
That's a bit of a taller order than the first glance because you would necessarily need to split the free packages into tiles. Feels like the better move would be for someone to just make tilesets of these brushes, and then just use an already-existing tilemap editor for the rest of the functionality.
But if it's worth anything, I agree that both a simple map editor using the brushes for blitting onto a canvas, and a tilemap editor that defaults to these permissively licensed assets should be pretty easy to put together. The former is more aligned with things I'm already working on, which is why I asked.
