Do you know that Tiled is something more than just timemap editor? It allows to put some useful meta-information on map, so you may not only paint levels, but change the behavior if needed.

In our Galvanica game we «painted» ship’s inner walls in Tiled, like this:

Then we added Objects layer called «zones» and located logical rooms and doors between them. Each room has unique id, and each door - list of room ids. This is used to process hull breaches (when ship is damaged by asteroid, for example) - the whole room is grayed out and doors locked.

Next useful layer - is «objects» layer. This is how the items are located within the ship. Initially we generated them in random places, but that did not look accurate, so we decided to place them manually:

The last layer - is «waypoints». After previous LDs I was lazy to implement A* one more time, so I just drawn possible ways in Tiled, like this:

Each moving object (alien, for example) follows these waypoints. When it finished its way, it looks for nearest waypoint and moves further. Someone may say that there will be problems with obstacles avoiding, but actually there are not the problem: aliens just eat anything on their way.

Sometimes hardcoding is just enough (that how we did in LD38), but powerful level editor like Tiled may save your nerves in many cases. Which good tools you using for level designing?