Lobster Nights
Lobster Nights was a game idea that I shared with a friend, and it was mostly a project to learn how each other program, and to engage in some creativity. The concept was to make a kind of game that involved careful platforming and physics combat, with AI swarm balancing mechanics that were popularized in Left 4 Dead.
My experience
The design took a bit of a backseat as the two of us were excited in programming any feature that we decided was essential to the basic gameplay.
Neither of had any level design experience, so during this project I looked for various tools that we could use for level design to allow for quick iteration. I found a variety of open source tools that we could integrate into our game engine, which was built using a combination of Pyglet, and the Box2D physics engine.
Some tools were for level design, and others were for game object design. The tools we used are documented on the Github page.