How many tiles in a tileset?

[tcaud]

What's optimal?

[Cyangmou]

depends on the game, the restrictions, the style and what you aim to achieve.

[tcaud]

Playing around with some of my own tile work, I've been able to discern some personal subjective impressions regarding the frequency and number of tiles used to suggest the same thing.

For example, you use a single tile for a side walk, and repeat it over and over, and before long, I get bored with seeing it. If you use two tiles (say one cracked and one not cracked), I start to get an impression of a place that's lively and unpredictable (like a late-80s NES game). I see three different tiles (not cracked plus two cracked in different ways), I start to feel a sort of arcade-y quality. like something made to draw my attention. At four tiles I begin not to notice the tiling anymore. And at five... it starts to seem real. But not real in a good way, more like real in a "sensory overloaded I-walk-down-the-street-and-hardly-notice-anything-about-it" kind of way.

[coffee]

This post probably belong in General discussion.

But anyway, like Cyangmou was saying and you yourself just explained it's about what feelings and other things you want to mediate. In my opinion simple and repetitiv tiles can be just as fun
made the right way, even if they are shown often. It is many times just a matter of style. I think overly detailed tiles can as you said make your head blank because of the many things you have
to focus on. I try to spread the detail and have spots of it instead of everywhere to draw the eye to one place at a time and not everywhere and nowhere.

A good mixture is something I always go for and what usually ends up as the best choice(for me and what I want to achieve)


Very simple all the way. A complete style that makes sense.

A good example from the forum, simple but with nice detail.
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=5291.msg63907#msg63907



Heavy textured

So I wouldn't say anything is better, more optimal, than the other.

-coffee

[Crow]

Moved. With today's restrictions (or lack thereof), I think it doesn't matter how many tiles you have in your tileset anymore.

[Zintendo]

I like what tcaud said, I like it a lot.


I'd recommend you follow his advice.


I go on tvtropes.org, they seem to have aspergers ocd and point out fimilarities and stuff that is extremely repetitive.  So I go on and check out what they say for RPG games, which invariably is often for NES/SNES sprited games.  They say in one of the tropes, that for any rpg-style game, your extremely likely to have a lava level, a forrest level, a mine, a town, etc, a water level, and a few others.

[ptoing]

That goes for most games, not just rpgs. Look at old platformers and how many have an ice, lava, forest, cave and so on level.

[tcaud]

When you compare the visuals of older NES games with those of newer NES games, you can notice a few things about the old games:
- the graphics are perfect (or nearly so)
- there are very few of them
- they don't use outlines

The reason for the poor graphics is that early NES games were only 64-80k in size. Seems like tile variety was the first thing artists went for when the higher memory chips came out.

[ptoing]

It is less about the cart size than about how many tiles you can have in memory at the same time. Newer games have special mapper chips on them which allowed for more tiles and/or faster swapping between character banks.

[Dusty]

You can pretty much use as many tiles as you want now, RAM and space is no longer an issue... but the more tiles you add, the more work it will take to create levels.