Hello Folks!

I'm an old gamer who recently started fiddling with some pixel art, and because this is a new world for me, and because I do not use any of the game editors, I would like to know some specifics about what I can and can not do with the design of a tile set.

I have started working on some 16px 2D platform dungeon tiles and I'm wondering if it's okay to add 'extra material'.  For example, I have created 3 variations of the regular horizontal floor tile, but on top of that I have also created more specific variations on those tiles. Like one has a small mushroom 'inside' of it (the tile looks like there's a ledge under the floor, kinda), another has a small skull 'inside' of it, and I have about 4 or those specific variations.

Now, I"m going even more crazy, because that entire set of tiles (including corners, verticals, stairs, etc), will be copied and turned into a 'grassy version', with a considerable amount of green growing all over the place.

Is that something you game creators can work with? I realize that some may consider it overkill on the variations, but I don't mind creating all of that. I'm mainly curious if it will cause any problems with how your editors work. In other words, would all that extra material be accepted by the editor and shown as options for user to work with, or will it crash and burn? :)

Maybe there's other information that is important here? For example, would a game become more heavy to run if it includes more tiles? Or maybe there are other reasons why I should not make the tile sets larger than regular?

Thanks for any replies!

Doc.

"would a game become more heavy to run if it includes more tiles?"

Technically, yes, but for modern games it shouldn't really be a concern. Games from the '80s would use hundreds of tiles at a time (these are 8x8 tiles), in the '90s they'd use thousands, now there is practically no limit except the amount of time that developers want to put into something.

I think there are basically two extremes, in terms of the way people work with tiles. On the one hand, you can just draw a whole scene without even worrying about tiles, and have software convert it to tiles automatically (likely producing a huge number of tiles). Or, you start out with categories of tiles (eg. floors, walls, furniture, etc.) and start laying them down one by one to build your scene. The best way is probably somewhere in between. For instance, you start with an image of a building, and then you copy&paste pieces of it to make other buildings.

That was really helpful. Thanks for the reply!

I have become a bit distracted from the tiles and started working on a larger scene, so in that respect I think I'm on the right path.