Lately I’ve been revisiting tilemap technology.
Way back last February I came up with the approach I’ve been using for most of CQ2’s development: make a handful of little half-size 8×8 tiles, and the system goes and builds everything it needs from those. It was super efficient… but it was kinda inflexible and obscure.
The new system is not efficient.
This is test artwork, stuff that won’t go into the game, but it shows how things work: every single possible tile, up to 47 tiles for a complete set, is laid out separately. Each one is 16x16px but has an 8px bleed area all the way around so it can overlay the tiles around it, like the high walls in the image above.
The system’s really stupid but it gives you total control. Being able to mess with all the tile variants, and having the bleed areas, means it’ll handle all that stuff in last year’s Boundaries post – and more besides – with no code changes, just artwork.
For now, I’ve made the existing forest tiles overlap the tile above.
It’s a start. 😀