Game development week 2 – Tiles
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Every game needs a map or at least some sort of background since otherwise the game would risk becoming boring or confusing. So that’s exactly what I’ve been up to this week. I’ve been creating maptiles for our game. We already decided the the game was gonna be in 1024×768 so that the game could be playable in fullscreen on 1920×1080 screens without having any black borders. Instead of working in Photoshop this time I decided I might as well try Aseprite, the sprite editor and pixel art tool I mentioned last week. It was way easier to get into than I initially thought. Most of the key shortcuts were quite similar to Photoshop which might be the main reason as to why I thought it was this easy to get into. The only bad thing I have to say really is the fact that all of the GUI is completely in pixel art which was a bit annoying at the beginning but you get used to this after a little while.
I opened up Aseprite and started working on tiles in the size of 64×64. It might have been easier or faster if I made them maybe twice as big but I felt like the map would become stale or risk getting repetetive more easily since then there would be less variants of tiles to work with later on when I put together the map itself. To make the images tile together, to make it sort of recurring without any apparent edges, I had to gvie some extra thought in how the edges would look like and copied them to a bigger canvas/workspace so I could put them together and changed them until they fit together properly.
After I made a couple of tiles I put them together in one image, a tile set. When the tileset was done I had to build up the maptiles themselves. This could more easily be done with a program called Tiled which Christoffer, our lead programmer suggested I would use. I found Tiled to be incredibly useful when working on tilebased maps. You basically open up a tileset and then start putting all the tiles together however you want them to as long as they all fit together. There is also layers that works much like in Photoshop so you can more easily organize stuff but also combine your different tiles together in order to keep some diversity.
The maptiles turned out to be more or less what I had in mind but so far I’m pretty happy with these. The maptiles I’ve made now are just a few of what I’m gonna make. I have, among other things, planned on making some variations in the size of where the player will run, the lower sand colored part. Though for now, these two will do.  |
