how to design a 2D game map?

Design Considerations

  Before spending hours on a huge project it is important to think about various aspects of it, what size are the tiles going to be? What resolution(s) and colour depth(s) is the game going to run in? What sort of view is it going to have (overhead, side, oblique, isometric)? How are the other game objects going to interact with the map? If you haven't done many tile based games before, it may be best to do a very simple pacman or shootemup project, just to get the hang of things.

 I would recommend that the width of the tile is a multiple of 4 (better memory alignment), try 16pixels wide by 16pixels high for low res games (320*240, 320*200) or 32*32pixels for 640*480 screen resolutions.

  Remember that computers are advancing all the time, try to support multiple colour depths and resolutions (if you think it's worth it), also consider doing your map in 24bit colour even if you are aiming for a 16bit screen, with an option to select any high colour depth, MappyDX supports colour conversion, check the docs for the other libs, of course, 24bit colour uses more disk space than 16bit. If you are aiming for a lowspec machine with a low resolution (such as VGA 320*200) use the Zoom option to get a better idea of the graphic size in Mappy, also if you know you aren't going to be able to access the video acceleration on the videocard (for example using VESA under DOS) bear in mind there will be a huge performance hit (the Anim Preview in MappyWin32 uses DirectDraw blitter acceleration found on almost all graphic cards)...

  The FMP file is ready to use from the first time you save it, so it makes sense to develop your game code at the same time as the map so you can see how things work and how fast they go, also remember to adjust the preview setup in MappyWin32 to the screen res. you are going to use...

  When making your graphics for tiles, use a picturesize that is a multiple of the tilesize, for example 32*32 and 16*16 tiles fit nicely on a 640*480 or 320*240 picture.

 

Please note that, above design guidline for map comes from theMappy Editor DOCS.

 As my studying, a complete map design needs below map tools:

• Tile graphic editor 基础对象编辑器

        e.g.Tile Studio (very strong and power... :-))

• Map editor  (Include the libs for loadingmaps)

        e.g.Mappy Editor 

        e.g.Tile Studio (It's also a map editor...)

• Object and areaeditor 高级对象建模编辑器

        Where has an open source project for this? Tell me...

Enjoy~

Mars

August 3,2013