The Tile Wizard Software

[drakus2011]

I have developed cross-platform software that may help you with creating terrain tiles for two-dimensional tile-based games. Its called The Tile Wizard. The Tile Wizard was designed for the main purpose of testing your tiles to see how they look together as they would be in your game.

The program is being constantly improved.

Find updated information at www.twodimensionalgames.com

[drakus2011]

The program has been slightly updated today.

[drakus2011]

Tile Menu:
 ID - Shows the Tile's number out of all of your tiles. Clicking this button selects this Tile as the active Tile.
 New - Clears any pixel drawing made to this Tile and erases its stored history.
 Load - Load a .png .bmp .gif .jpg or .jpeg image to work with.(You must load an image of the size you specified at startup)
 Save - Save your Tile as a .png .bmp .gif .jpg or .jpeg image.(Saves the image as the size you specified at startup)
 Grid - A grid that overlays a Tile area if you want that feature turned on for that Tile.
 ANIM - (Animation Sequence) - Create an animation sequence within this Tile. Placing this Tile in the Tile Tester's Override Mode will cycle through the frames of this sequence(using the specified delay values) where it would normally be displayed. Holding the control key down and clicking this button will remove the Tile's animation sequence if it has one.


Tile:
 Allows basic pixel editing of tiles. Edit tiles at a 1000% zoom level.
 Undo pixel - Undo as many pixel markings as you want until you reach the beginning of the active Tile.
 Redo pixel - Redo pixel markings until you are at the most recent action on your active Tile or until you draw a new pixel.


Tile Tester:
 Default Mode - See tiling of your active Tile in an 8x6 tiled area.
 Override Mode - Place custom tiling of any of your opened tiles in the same 8x6 area. Now supports Animation Sequences.
 Default and Override Modes - See the editing of your tiles instantly take affect in the Tile Tester.


Real Size Display:
 See what your current page's tiles look like at a 100% zoom level.


Color Creator:
 Color Bar - Shows a horizontal bar of each possible R, G, or B color one pixel wide for each hue.
 Value - Each R, G, or B Color Bar has its numerical value displayed to the Color Bar's left.
 Slider - Slide the vertical bar onto the desired R, G, or B value.
 Set Palette Color - Click this solid colored rectangle( R, G, B Color Bar values combined ) to set the selected Palette Slot's color to be this color.


Palette Menu:
 New - Clear any customized colors and start from a blank palette.
 Load - Load a saved Palette from a previous session. Also loads your previous Color Quickbar.
 Save - Save your customized Palette and also your customized Color Quickbar.


Palette:
 Customizable color Palette with 256 Palette Slots.
 Copy a Palette Slot to a different Slot by dragging a color to a new location.


Color Quickbar:
 10 Color Quickbar Slots to quickly change color while editing your tiles. Accessable with your keyboard's 1-0 keys, - and = keys, and the keyboard's numberpad.


Color Grabber:
 Hold the control key and left click a pixel in your Tile to place the selected pixel's color into the currently selected Palette Slot.


Custom Tile Size:
The program now supports a custom Tile size. You can enter a custom width and height during the program's startup. The size must be: an even number, greater than zero, and less than sixty-five.. Only one size may be used per instance of the program.


More tiles:
 The program is not limited to four tiles anymore. You can have as many tiles as you need to work with using the Back and Next buttons.

[drakus2011]

Thats the program in action.

[Mathias]

Great! Now if only it could handle more than 4 tiles at once. Instead of changing the sizes of the areas containing the 4 tiles' data/image, why not add more pages you can page through? Or even a scrollbar so more fit in. Have the left 2 thirds of the app be scrollable, vertically.

If more tiles were easily tossed into the "minimap" square it would become much more robust for tile testing. A typical tileset for one terrain type has 16 tiles. And tiled worlds are comprised of numerous terrain types - 16 x [quantity of terrain types] = tiles possibly viewable at once.

[drakus2011]

Thanks for the feedback Mathias.  I can start doing that this weekend.

[Mathias]

Sounds good!

• You need an application icon.
• you thought about different sized tiles? If a dev isn't using 32x32, he's screwed. No reason to support multiple sized tiles, unless they're maybe powers of two, but that's a rare need.
• Why not a typical OS window dialogue boxes for loading tiles? Yours doesn't even have a cursor caret. Just a little inconvenient.
• Along with adding more tiles you can simultaneously test, I think the minimap needs to be larger. Why not make it a separate form/window in your app. Let it be free floating. Got a homey with a habit of doing that when making apps for us. Works great.
• What about animated tiles? There would be no need to having editing capabilities for animated tiles, like there are for non-animated ones, because you get into frames. Don't forget the purpose of this app, it's not a tile editor, it's a tile tester. It's current editing tools are probably sufficient.

[drakus2011]

Thanks for the great suggestions Mathias!
I can try my hand at an Icon but it will most likely not be pretty. (graphics are not my best skill, however I am starting to learn so the practice should be good for me anyway)

I have thought about different sized tiles but put it on the backburner since I was only going to be practicing with 32x32 sized tiles for my games, since I put it up for everyone I can start messing with different sized tiles.  I'm thinking that the tile tester(minimap) should have a consistant value for a tile's size, so maybe at the start of the application you would enter in the tile size you'll be working with.  Unless I should try and figure something out for an assortment of different sized tiles being pieced together.

Originally the program was a fullscreen application and it supported a large screen.  I shrunk its resolution to work with smaller laptop computers as well and changed it from fullscreen to a window.  Thats why the custom pop-up dialog boxes are not OS based, because with doing fullscreen I had to stop using Java's prebuilt components like dialog boxes because they would minimize the application and interrupt your workflow a lot more than you'd like.  As the program is no longer fullscreen it will not get minimized due to being fullscreen, so I could give you some normal dialog boxes.  I was also constrained for space in the small window so I shrank the tile tester from 10x10 to 8x6, thats actually a great idea, to put it in a seperate window.

Maybe some way to link as many tiles as you want into an animated tile.  Set their frame number and their timings.

I pretty much made the application to help train myself in pixel art for terrain tiles.  That was the original purpose.  To be able to edit a tile and see the effects it had on the game world in real time.
I however, have no problem enhancing this for everyone elses purposes either.  Makes it more helpful for you and me.

Thanks again Mathias.

[Mathias]

In my little circle of game developer wanna-be buds, I'm known as the master feature creeper, so even though I try hard to only supply ideas I think are useful, you should use wisdom in filtering out the pointless suggestions you may get from me, or others. You're doing the work, afterall.



Anyway . . . another one for ya . . .

You mention linking tiles. One irritation for many users will be that their folder structure has to be changed, or at least their flow for managing assets is affected a little awkwardly - enter, your Tiles folder. It only find tiles in that folder. Since the vast majority will not use theTile Wizard for editing, this means they'll continue to use their own editor, whatever it is, and then paste copies of their tiles into the tile folder, then hit load, then have to manually type the filename. This rather wreaks of the DOS-like days of computing don't you think? Drag and drop functionality would be a huge upgrade - just grab a file from yer file browser and drop it onto the desired tile pane, which there are 4 of currently. Drag-and-drop, it's so fast.

I have pretty high hopes for this app. I've always wanted a tool to quickly test tiles. One thing I strongly urge you to do, like I've already mentioned, is remember The Tile Wizard's purpose, and therefore it's prospective place in an artist's workflow - to test tiles, how they look together when juxtaposed to one another, their seamlessness, do they obfuscate the grid well enough, etc. Try not to don't dilute your efforts and bloat the program with unnecessary features - a common pitfall for so much good software. This'll never replace Photoshop or Promotion, but it may become the most valuable stand-alone tile tester, who knows. Go for it!

[drakus2011]

I'll check out Java's built in file chooser dialog box and I'll mess with dragging and dropping some more and see what I can do with that.
I will keep each program short and sweet and for pixel art.  I will be making more programs for other things than just terrain tiles... when I get to those areas in my current game project.  I was thinking of integrating them into one main program with seperate sections perhaps, or keep them single applications, not completely sure until I make the others.