Tilin’ away
Monday, January 9th, 2006Well, since everybody I asked who said they would do tiles for me either vanished, exploded or ran away like scared children when I asked them to actually do work, I decided to start making tiles on my own.
I prepared a nice little photoshop template which makes tiling ever so easy. Well, for floor/platform tiles anyway. Essentially, you just need to make a 16×16 pattern, and fill the entire template with it, and various clipping path magicks take care of the rest. You can also tint it various colours 
It’s in Photoshop CS2 format, but if anyone has an earlier version I’d like to see if it works for you. It should, I don’t use anything that hasn’t been around since version 5 or 6, but who knows?
I’m actually still working on it (i.e. it’s not finished), as I’m still adding ‘cracked’ tiles to it. The idea is that there’s two versions of each tiles: a regular one and a cracked one. The cracked one is generally just for decoration, but maybe I could make a puzzle, I dunno. The download below just has two copies of the same tiles, in preperation of the bottom one being cracked.
Anyway, if you want to start making tiles (which I would very much like ), here’s the template:
Mini instruction manual:
The first two layers are the “Border” and “Highlight” layers. Just leave them alone, they put the nice black outline around the tiles, and that 3d-ish look. Although, you can invert the Highlight layer if you want it to look “pressed in” instead of “bulging out”.
Then there’s the the “Pattern” layer. This is where your design goes. Just paste it in to the top-left corner, and copy it over the whole thing. Alternatively, if you know how to define a real pattern, do so and use the flood fill.
Below that is the colour layer. Double click on it to choose a new colour. Don’t worry. The grey colour on the bottom most layer has nothing to do with this.
Finally, second from the bottom is the “Shape” layer. It merely defines the shape of the tiles, in terms of the clipping masks immediately above it. Don’t mess around with it unless you know what you’re doing.
(Then there’s the background layer which is nothing but the nice cyan background. Incidentally, if you make the tiles cyan, or anything close to cyan, change the background colour to something else, so the tiles don’t become transparent in-game)
I’ve also worked on the engine itself, but I’ve been typing too much for now, so blah.
Edit: I uploaded a new version with a missing tile… <_<
