Tiles, they can either be your best friends or your worst enemies!

In this post I will talk about how to make a decent tileset with a hopefully understandable structure in it.

Using tiles and tilesets is a method that is used by a lot of games to draw a mostly static environment. Tiles are simply small pieces of terrain which the developers put together into maps which can later be played by the player. The good thing about tiles is the small size of the images. Especially when you are working with platforms with a limited amount of memory and performance tiles can help you create large worlds which otherwise would be very hard to create. If you want to read more on tiles you can also visit Wikipedia.

When creating the tiles for our new game I have decided to put together a few guidelines which I would like to share to the rest of you out there!

• First, think about what your game should look like. You don’t want to have to redraw your whole tileset a milion times!
• How is the world going to look like? Do you need a tileset with a version of every tile in every direction? Or is grass only going to be below you and trees in a horizontal position?
• Noise is beautiful (I will explain later on, just keep it in mind!)

Due to the physics of our latest game, we can have almost all of our terrain as walls, floors and roof. This made us desire a tileset which would look nice in any kind of rotation. We also wanted to be able to connect different kinds of terrain with eachother (which is something you generally like to do). The first version of the game took place in outer space, with a simple white outline used as the bounds of each level. We then used this tileset:

This tileset was a bit hard to work with and it wasn’t very intuitive to build levels with. We had to do something about this and decided to build tilesets which had the shape of an outer square and an inner square. This made it much easier to build levels and you almost immediately knew which piece you should use. The new tileset looked something like this:

As seen here you can easily make a world with different pieces or terrain and edges to make it varying. When we started to use this we noticed that the bumpyness of the grass was too regular. If one bump were larger than the others this could easily be spotted and it didn’t look very nice. It’s here the last point in my list comes in: Noise is beautiful. By noise I mean a constant variance over the grass. If you have a more edgy looking grass with more bumps then it wont look as wierd if you tile the same piece next to itself since the noise prevents the mind to see where one piece starts and the next one stops. This information left us with the current tileset that we are using which looks like this:

Hopefully, from now on, tiles will always be our best friends!

Jonas Bergström
chillbro studios