The Everdream uses tilemap as the base of building the game levels, it is a common technique used in 2D games development for creating maps and levels, it will combine pre-made variations of tiles into a map.

In starting the journey of building our levels in Unity, we used Tiled as our tool to manage the tilemaps for all levels in our game. Once we import the tilemap into the Unity scene, it allows us to edit while seeing the changes made inside Unity, which is efficient in making adjustments to the maps. But that’s a later story, the first step into making our tilemaps are creating organized, regular shaped tilesets. We used 32x32 pixels sized squared tiles that come with variations of flat, corners, slopes and sometimes a bit more pattern variations as well.

(Moss tileset made by Gran)

They are organized into a spritesheet like above and imported to Tiled for drawing the map. Our tilemap will serve as platforms, grounds and walls that require collision, which we can easily add collisions to the tiles in Tiled using the tile collision editor with the shape we want.

(A slope example using the tile collision editor)

In our case, we design our levels by making a blockout first, to test the spacing, navigation and puzzle locations inside a level, if they are working fine then overlay another layer in Tiled on top of the blockout using the customized tilesets and making minor adjustments onwards from that.

(Blockout layer)

(Overlay layer)

We will hide the blockout layer once the overlay layer is finished and below is how it looks like in the game~

(In game view)

P.S. When importing the tilemap into Unity, it is always a good habit to check if the pixels per unit of the tileset is set to the size of your tiles were made from (/ω＼), or something may look surprising…

(Setting pixels per unit in inspector of imported tileset in Unity)

• Xin