Tile Tools

Except for standard image editing software, there are hundreds of tools specially suited for processing tiles. These below are my favourite ones.

TEXTURE MAKER

A powerful tool for making seamless tiles. The best thing about it is the interface for painting tiles: tiles are automatically wrapped, so while you paint, you can see that it is seamless. It has more filters than Photoshop.

MAPZONE

This tool is a procedural texture generator. It is extremely powerful and has built-in support for making seamless tiles. It is actually built for 3D texturing, so it also comes with support for bump maps and so on. The free version is full-featured, except that it does not come with real-time support.

TUDEE

One of the guys at Luma developed this extremely useful 2D level editor. It is geared for working with tiles, and has a rich feature set. Its greatest feature is its exporting system: it allows you to write your own exporter in a very straightforward manner, which means that you can support your own custom file formats.

A Few Tips

• You must carefully consider whether the repetitiveness and geometric symmetry listed as "problems" of tiled games are indeed problems for your game, before proceeding to implement some of the techniques here. The simplicity of vanilla tiles is in some cases the charm of a game.
  
• Calculate the number of tiles that will be required for a specific system before you make them (whether it is by hand or machine). This number might be much bigger than you think; you might be compelled to constrain the system a bit.
  
• Procedural techniques do not replace the artist; they multiply what an artist can do. To remind yourself of how awful procedurals can look without proper artistic input, look here. Always consult with an artist to make sure that your procedural techniques come to their best. If you work alone, consult the artist within you.
  
• A tile system can become arbitrarily complex, and you must guard against it becoming too complex. If your tile engine is more complicated than a 3D game engine, you are (probably) on the wrong track.
  
• When using dynamic colouring, it is better to use bright, saturated colours for the colour tiles, and control blending with parameters. This allows you to use the same colour set for all textures. For the same reason, it is better to use high contrast imagery for the texture tiles.
  
• When you build levels by hand, and your tile sets with smooth transitions between regions, do not build the tile grid – build the logical grid, and construct tile grid algorithmically. Because of the number of tiles, building with full-blend sets can be cumbersome.
  
• Microsoft Excel or Open office Calc can serve as crude level builders. You can use strings or codes to define a region type, and use conditional formatting to get visual feedback. The file can be saved in some XML format, and be imported with simple-to-write code.

More Resources

This article looks at many key issues for tile programming, including layered maps, see-through roofs and some special effects.

A 104-page PDF tutorial about using tiles with Flash.

Lots of short tutorials for creating tile based games.

This article looks at some of the issues you need to consider when using tile sets for terrains.

For the mathematically inclined: Wang tiles formalise tile matching. See the paper Wang Tiles for Image and Texture Generation (PDF).

Download Source Code

You can download a Python implementation of some of these blending techniques from here. The file blend_demo.py has the function relevant to this tutorial.