Tile Based Levels

We have all played games that use levels constructed from reusable tiles. When we think of tile based games, Mario usually comes to mind along with countless other classic Nintendo games. Isometric games and even fully 3D games can be made from tiles. In the case of 3D games the tiles are not sprites, they are carefully constructed models that fit together seamlessly. There are many advantages to building games using tiling graphics. First, they allow for greater reusability. A very large level can be built from a relatively small number of unique tiles. This not only saves the developer a lot of work, but it helps to make the game load faster and take up less disk space. The reuse of graphics allows each tile to have more detail (higher resolution, or increased polygon count in the case of 3D models). It is also far easier to construct a level editor for tiled environments. This can allow developers to ship level editing software with the game.

The very simple example above uses a sprite sheet so that all the tiles are stored in one image file. A large image could contain hundreds of tiles, and loading one large image is much faster than loading hundreds of small images. In this example, the level is very small and consists of one “patch” of tiles. Tile based levels are usually divided into many small square shaped patches. That way, we only have to render the patches that are on the screen. If we were to render a large level as one big array of tiles, we would be rendering many tiles that are off the screen which can cause the game to run slowly. Likewise, if we were to try and test whether each individual tile is on the screen before rendering it, this could cause the game to run slow. With the world divided into patches, one simple test can eliminate an entire patch allowing the game to run smoothly even when the level is extremely large.

TileBasedLevels.zip 33KB