At its core, the design process of using Tiled to create maps works by following these steps:
Choose your map size and base tile size.
Add tilesets from image(s).
Place the tilesets on the map.
Add any additional objects to represent something abstract.
Save the map as a tmx file.
Import the tmx file and interpret it for your game.
I’m really lost at the second point. How should be this/these image/s? A big image to be split or a collection of small sprites like corners, walls, road rivers, etc to be put together? Any case, I get that Tiled is not a drawing tool, so I need… Gimp? Inkscape? I’m no artist, I just want to make something that does the job for my game, but I simply don’t know where to start.
Tiled can work with 2 kind of tile formats. The first is a simple image collection. If you go to Map -> New Tileset. You can select the Type Collection of Images. This allows you do simply add as many image files as you want to your tileset. Each image file will be one tile then.
The second type is Based on tileset image. Here you select an image like http://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/horse_1.png and specify width, height, spacing, etc and Tiled will split the image into tiles according to this.
You will of course need a drawing tool to create these tiles. Wether you use Inkspace, Gimp, Photoshop, Krita or MS Paint does not matter. Just use what works best for you
Thank you for your answer. I didn’t know Krita: it is a great program, but it is huge for me.
There’s no much docu about Tiled, but I have finally managed to prepare a tileset image with GraphicsGale and I have made a decent map with grass and sand.
