Tile-based video game


A tile-based video game is a type of video or video game where the playing area consists of small square graphic images referred to as tiles laid out in a grid. That the screen is made of such tiles is a technical distinction, and may not be obvious to people playing the game. The complete set of tiles available for use in a playing area is called a tileset. Tile-based games usually simulate a top-down, side view, or 2.5D view of the playing area, and are almost always two-dimensional.
Much video game hardware from the late 1970s through the mid 1990s had native support for displaying tiled screens with little interaction from the CPU.

Overview

Tile-based games are not a distinct video game genre; rather, the term refers to the technology a game engine uses for its visual representation. For example, Ultima III is a role-playing video game and Civilization is a turn-based strategy game, but both use tile-based graphic engines. Tile-based engines allow developers to create large, complex gameworlds efficiently and with relatively few art assets.
Tile-based video games usually use a texture atlas for performance reasons. They also store metadata about the tiles, such as collision, damage, and entities, either with a 2-dimensional array mapping the tiles, or a second texture atlas mirroring the visual one but coding metadata by colour. This approach allows for simple, visual map data, letting level designers create entire worlds with a tile reference sheet and perhaps a text editor, a paint program, or a simple level editor. Examples of tile-based game engine/IDEs include RPG Maker,, Construct, Godot, and Tiled.
Variations include level data using "material tiles" that are procedurally transformed into the final tile graphics, and groupings of tiles as larger-scale "supertiles" or "chunks," allowing large tiled worlds to be constructed under heavy memory constraints. Ultima 7 uses a "tile," "chunk" and "superchunk" three-layer system to construct an enormous, detailed world within the PCs of the early 1990s.

History

The tile-map model was introduced to video games by Namco's arcade game Galaxian, which ran on the Namco Galaxian arcade system board, capable of displaying multiple colors per tile as well as scrolling. It used a tile size of 8×8 pixels, which since became the most common tile size used in video games. A tilemap consisting of 8×8 tiles required 64 times less memory and processing time than a non-tiled framebuffer, which allowed Galaxians tile-map system to display more sophisticated graphics, and with better performance, than the more intensive framebuffer system previously used by Space Invaders. Video game consoles such as the Intellivision, released in 1979, were designed to use tile-based graphics, since their games had to fit into video game cartridges as small as 4K in size, and all games on the platform were tile-based.
Home computers had hardware tile support in the form of ASCII characters arranged in a grid, usually for the purposes of displaying text, but games could be written using letters and punctuation as game elements. The Atari 400/800 home computers, released in 1979, allow the standard character set to be replaced by a custom one. The new characters don't have to be glyphs, but the walls of a maze or ladders or any game graphics that fit in an 8x8 pixel square. The video coprocessor provides different modes for displaying character grids. In most modes, individual monochrome characters can be displayed in one of four colors; others allow characters to be constructed of 2-bit pixels instead. Atari used the term redefined characters and not tiles.
The tile model became widely used in specific game genres such as platformers and role-playing video games, and reached its peak during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras of consoles, with games such as Mega Man, and Shining Force being prime examples of tile-based games, producing a highly recognizable look and feel.
features multi-character combat on a tiled overhead map
Most early tile-based games used a top-down perspective. The top-down perspective evolved to a simulated 45-degree angle, seen in 1994's Final Fantasy VI, allowing the player to see both the top and one side of objects, to give more sense of depth; this style dominated 8-bit and 16-bit console role-playing games. Ultimate Play the Game developed a series of video games in the 1980s that employed a tile-based isometric perspective. As computers advanced, isometric and dimetric perspectives began to predominate in tile-based games, using parallelogram-shaped tiles instead of square tiles. Notable titles include:
Hexagonal tile-based games have been limited for the most part to the strategy and wargaming genres. Notable examples include the Sega Genesis game Master of Monsters, SSI's Five Star series of wargames, the Age of Wonders series and Battle for Wesnoth''.