I guess it depends because I just need 2 levels of tiles.
Ground floor Door for entrance, a horizontal column type to separate the level then the window level. Each level as it's own asset I can can tile them myself. Not looking for anything mind blowing.
this guy has some rpg assets that look pretty cool for free if you go through this link tilemap rpg I think he had about 200 tile squares ( grass, roads, traps, walls, etc. )
Playing around with a roguelike idea(RPG) i had this art work costs $10. Check out the movie animations, blood particles and a whole dungeon tile set with chibi's as the characters.
You know in Unity they have so many assets for $5 to make that. I once created a map creator that just had everything at 50 ( Sea Level ) and I randomly placed Volcanoes and Sinkholes ( Creates a circle and adds or subtracts the sea level for game maps like Conquest of the empire and Risk. Was really awesome and the sea level determine the color of the square to look like beaches and mountains.
Later I randomized the colors inside the square based on it and the surrounding squares. Looked awesome.
@William.Thompsonj To add to that i'm a mobile developer so I use Xamarin all day. I did DOS games in the late 90's. I have a roguelike i've done and like you I had games I worked on and spent years tweaking.
Although recently after going through OpenGL Android, SpriteKit for Apple, and Direct3d for Windows I found writing your own engine is a waste of time. Yeah if you're rich and have maids keeping your house up, but with a job no way.
I.m working on 5 games that start out easy then I turn them into a novel. I spent months making an engine basing it on SpriteKit and it was good. I was 50% done.
I looked at some engines and did Unity because my other developer co workers were going that way. At first I was like what no code. But, now it's really fast. I'm 70% finished with my main game that I re-did because it was my first in Unity. 2 weeks total so far and should be in beta hopefully in 2 weeks.
So here's what I changed to be faster. Trying to optimize so that once I have an idea for content. I can roll out a medium sized game in 1 month.
I create all my props for scenes in their own package. Char, animations, state machine. Export that to my main PC server at home.
When I start a game I import all the things I need Tilemaps(multi layered levels like Tiled ), chars ( has all the animations, states, and scripts ), A game controller I made with an object pool for grabbing items.
This has worked really well so far. I like Unity because it does almost everything for you and I just write small c# scripts for anything custom.
But, this new strategy forces me to keep things generic in that I have to abstract everything, because a specific char or item may not exist and I don't want to solve bugs after importing. I got it down pretty well.
That book is amazing and goes deep into the game develiopment and creating procedural levels. He also goes into game design and how to improve story telling.
I find when I'm making a design, I have a lot of Warhammer, D&D, and other fantasy book for ideas and battle systems. I also watch crazy movies to get ideas and drinking with friends you can come up with strange ideas. Some materilize some dont.
I have a scrapbook with about 10 ideas of games and just keep it there.
Just my take on things. Games are like a lifelong learning process and growth I think.
I'm doing 2 games right now in Unity. It's actually pretty easy. Here they are compared. I started creating packages so once I have a feature, I package it up. This way I can add it to new games with a single import.
I guess it depends because I just need 2 levels of tiles.
Ground floor Door for entrance, a horizontal column type to separate the level then the window level. Each level as it's own asset I can can tile them myself. Not looking for anything mind blowing.
this guy has some rpg assets that look pretty cool for free if you go through this link tilemap rpg I think he had about 200 tile squares ( grass, roads, traps, walls, etc. )
Playing around with a roguelike idea(RPG) i had this art work costs $10. Check out the movie animations, blood particles and a whole dungeon tile set with chibi's as the characters.
Here is rogue
This took about 4 hours to get set up with controllers, object pools, animation, breaking up tiles sets, etc.
You know in Unity they have so many assets for $5 to make that. I once created a map creator that just had everything at 50 ( Sea Level ) and I randomly placed Volcanoes and Sinkholes ( Creates a circle and adds or subtracts the sea level for game maps like Conquest of the empire and Risk. Was really awesome and the sea level determine the color of the square to look like beaches and mountains.
Later I randomized the colors inside the square based on it and the surrounding squares. Looked awesome.
I hide the other layers and File-Export or you can save a new file as your .png file name. In a worse case, open the file in photoshop or paint.
I'm not an artist, so my way is slightly crude.
@William.Thompsonj To add to that i'm a mobile developer so I use Xamarin all day. I did DOS games in the late 90's. I have a roguelike i've done and like you I had games I worked on and spent years tweaking.
Although recently after going through OpenGL Android, SpriteKit for Apple, and Direct3d for Windows I found writing your own engine is a waste of time. Yeah if you're rich and have maids keeping your house up, but with a job no way.
I.m working on 5 games that start out easy then I turn them into a novel. I spent months making an engine basing it on SpriteKit and it was good. I was 50% done.
I looked at some engines and did Unity because my other developer co workers were going that way. At first I was like what no code. But, now it's really fast. I'm 70% finished with my main game that I re-did because it was my first in Unity. 2 weeks total so far and should be in beta hopefully in 2 weeks.
So here's what I changed to be faster. Trying to optimize so that once I have an idea for content. I can roll out a medium sized game in 1 month.
I create all my props for scenes in their own package. Char, animations, state machine. Export that to my main PC server at home.
When I start a game I import all the things I need Tilemaps(multi layered levels like Tiled ), chars ( has all the animations, states, and scripts ), A game controller I made with an object pool for grabbing items.
This has worked really well so far. I like Unity because it does almost everything for you and I just write small c# scripts for anything custom.
But, this new strategy forces me to keep things generic in that I have to abstract everything, because a specific char or item may not exist and I don't want to solve bugs after importing. I got it down pretty well.
@Spring
Have you read this https://bossfightbooks.com/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu
That book is amazing and goes deep into the game develiopment and creating procedural levels. He also goes into game design and how to improve story telling.
This guy based his level maker on https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/strata-easy-2d-l...
I find when I'm making a design, I have a lot of Warhammer, D&D, and other fantasy book for ideas and battle systems. I also watch crazy movies to get ideas and drinking with friends you can come up with strange ideas. Some materilize some dont.
I have a scrapbook with about 10 ideas of games and just keep it there.
Just my take on things. Games are like a lifelong learning process and growth I think.
I'm doing 2 games right now in Unity. It's actually pretty easy. Here they are compared. I started creating packages so once I have a feature, I package it up. This way I can add it to new games with a single import.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbcLuYBxbIE