A screenshot of Five Suns, my senior project from SCAD.
Recently I created an effect for my game, Visual Out, that I’m pretty happy with. I had some wire assets that were static images, that I wanted to animate when the player touched them.
I’m a pixel artist and a game developer, but I hate making tilemaps. To me, it’s just tedium – making the same image over and over with little tweaks for corners and edges. And SO many combinations of corners and edges.
So when I heard there was a tool that would automatically create an entire tilemap from as little as just three images, I knew I had to try it.
All you need is a single tileable texture, a “cap and bottom” image, and a “sides” image. If you want a background included in your tilemap, that’s a very simple forth image. AutoTileGen then does all the tedious work for you!
A while ago I came across a 3D Tilemapping tool that was unlike anything I had ever seen. It’s called Crocotile 3D, and I’ve been itching to try it out for months.
Create 3d models and environments with tiles. Typically tiles are used from 2d tilemaps to construct flat scenes, but Crocotile 3d adds another dimension.
While I typically work on pixel art and animations using Graphics Gale (mentioned in my Favorite Gamedev Tools post) , I like trying out new tools. Pickle caught my eye when I saw its terrain mode – a live-updating tilemap editor that displays all possible combinations of tiles at once. I knew I had to try it out, so I downloaded the 7-day trial and gave it a whirl!
