Beyond a basic programming course I took back in high school, I’ve not been too attached to the topic. I downloaded Tiled to help me design maps for a board game I’m working on, since my old method of map-making was beyond tedious.
So, first, I have no idea how to use this program. I was able to set up a blank grid of tiles and that’s where I become lost in a sea of words I’m not familiar with. Does Tiled come with a basic package of available terrain tiles - such as those used in the examples on the home page - or do I have to create them on my own and them somehow import them into the program?
And god willing I ever make it so far, but is there a way for me to take any maps I create and save them as transferable image files, something I can later import to photoshop?
I probably have a lot more questions. I am not a stupid man, but in this area of the modern world I am hopelessly lost. I would greatly appreciate any kind of leg-up you can give me, even if it’s to say that Tiled is all about being able to program or something and that my ignorance is insurmountable.
Thanks guys. Hopefully things aren’t as dire as I feel right now.
Tiled comes with a rather minimal set of examples. You can search for tilesets on the internet if you don’t want to draw them yourself, for example at http://opengameart.org/. Once you got one, you add it to your map using the menu action Map → New Tileset…
Okay! So I have this picture already that I was using to manually insert tiles into a grid I worked up in photoshop. How would I go about saving each little square as its own tile for Tiled, and how then do I group them all together as a single tileset? (Hopefully I’m gaining a better understanding of what I need to do.)
The tiles are already together in a single tileset, so you don’t need to do anything. You go to Map → New Tileset…, make sure the type is Based on Tileset Image, select the image as the source, set Margin and Spacing both to 1px (since your image shows a 1 pixel border and a 1 pixel space between the tiles). The Tile width and Tile height should be on 16 pixels, which is what you should have chosen when creating the new map as well. Finally press Ok and you can start drawing.
