Gameboy Development Forum

There's Tiled, but personally I just use a good image editor, and process images using rgbgfx and SuperFamiconv. This is a much superior approach to dedicated tile editors, because they are more universally usable, and can be integrated into the build process. Tilemap Studio was designed for the Pokémon disassemblies, and is used there because the files they are using cannot be generated from images in most cases. But homebrews don't have the limitation of needing to produce a matching ROM, so we can do better.

The workflow I'm using on a game I'm working on is that the artists have designed images (one using Aseprite, the other GraphicsGale), and I have tools that process them into raw tile data. The major upside is that they do a better job at optimizing data than humans do (for example, finding flipped tiles, or packing colors into palettes), they can report possible areas of improvement, etc. As I mentioned before, it also lets the artists use whatever tools they want, which they are usually more comfortable with, better suited to drawing pixel art, and just available on more platforms. I compile my game on Linux, and the artists work on Windows—neither of us care about the other, because images are universal :p

Examples of such images:
One and two. (Not included as direct embeds because the sizes are massive, and I don't know how to resize with this forum's BBCode)

RGBGFX works better for single-palette images, SuperFamiconv works better for multi-palette images. It's a bit annoying that both have their own set of flaws the other doesn't, but it's worked very well for me so far.


Now, all of this works well for simple tilemaps, but when metadata needs to be added, things get more iffy. Since you will certainly use your own format, you will probably need to develop your own toolset—although GUI programming can be quite annoying—but I've heard that Tiled may be well-suited for that purpose. I have yet to experiment with it; but my plan is to still rely on images, and use yet more tools to associate external metadata, while applying some error-checking to avoid stupid issues. I'm not there in the game's development yet, but I will definitely share the result of my experiments ^^

gameboy79 wrote:

I can see the upsides for Map and Tiles, but how about Tile Attributes? Like which tiles are colliders and interactive (I guess you could just use a different layer of the image and post-process it differently). GBMapEditor does this quite well in my opinion, if only it wouldn't be so tiny on my 4k screen

ISSOtm wrote:

Now, all of this works well for simple tilemaps, but when metadata needs to be added, things get more iffy. Since you will certainly use your own format, you will probably need to develop your own toolset—although GUI programming can be quite annoying—but I've heard that Tiled may be well-suited for that purpose. I have yet to experiment with it; but my plan is to still rely on images, and use yet more tools to associate external metadata, while applying some error-checking to avoid stupid issues. I'm not there in the game's development yet, but I will definitely share the result of my experiments ^^

The workflow I use for pixel collision is to have another layer, containing either transparent or red pixels; the layer being at 50% alpha. Works well for individual pixels, less so for tiles.

For tiles, since collision is managedper meta-tile (16x16 pixels) instead of tiles, I plan to have tools read the generated tilemaps, collision and attribute files, and produce an image like the above, which would allow visualizing collision states on the whole map.
This should be very flexible, and provide a good overview of any mistakes that may occur.

Please post your experiences later, this is a topic that still doesn't have a definitive answer afaik, so more input would be super useful to everyone ^^

Is there a way to output image width and height (in pixels or in tiles)  with either rgbgfx or superfamiconv in an .inc file ?

ok, thanks for the info. I have tried the following command:
magick identify -format "WIDTH equ %w / 8\nHEIGHT equ %h / 8\n" test.png > test.png.size

but I get the following result in test.png.size:
WIDTH equ h / 8

I cannot figure out what is wrong with the command

%% was the solution, THANKS!