Thanks for the input, MrGuest! This will be very helpful. But now I have another question for you guys.

For the last few days I've been thinking about creating a simple tile based map format, but I noticed that using ent_create() to spawn multiple map entities in this fashion chews away at the nexus at a ridiculous rate. Can this be changed? And if not, what kind of map format would you suggest I use?

I'm reluctant to build my maps in WED because I want to keep my game grid based and simple, and WED interferes with this idea on a number of levels.