Tilesets And More [But Not Really]

[WARNING: Image-heavy post]

Here's part 2 of the basic RM2K tutorial. I don't feel particularly inspired today, but I gotta write these up.

Today's picture of the day is something to cheer myself up with.

Dangnabbit, I said cheer

Step 3: What does this button do?

That's right, Step 3. You can find Steps 1 & 2 in the previous blog post.

Let's take a look at what else we can add to our map, shall we? Spoiler: You can totally add buttons too, but not with the basic tileset.

We'll click on the second layer on the toolbar (check out the previous post if you are unfamiliar with the toolbar or any part of the editor), and that will take us to the 'foreground' layer. This part of the tileset contains everything that we can add to the foreground of the map.

The highlighted tile - the first blank space on the top left - is a kind of 'eraser' for the foreground layer.

You'll find tiles for mountains, trees, barrels and beds; in the basic tileset we're using, you'll find a mix of both interior and exterior foreground elements. Let's add some stuff in!

Random skeletons ftw!

That made the map a whole lot less barren-looking! Now, just because these are foreground elements doesn't mean they're all at the same level as the hero sprite.

Enter the Tileset tab in the database.

Let's quickly go through the highlighted panels briefly, before looking at the most important ones in detail-

1. This is the list of tilesets available for your entire game. You can rename them in panel 3.

2. This button lets you increase or decrease the maximum number of tilesets you can use in the game.

3. Basic info about the tileset you're using - its name, and the tileset graphic from the RTP library.

4. This panel lets us edit certain features of the tileset, and that's what we'll look into a bit more next.

As you can see, where the black arrow points, we have 2 tabs- Lower layer and upper layer. The lower layer tab lets us edit the properties of the background tiles, while the other tab is for the foreground tiles.

From left to right, we see an edit panel, a panel with all the tiles visible, with numbers on them, and finally a 'Terrain' panel. We'll cover terrain last as it ties to another tab on the database.

Under the label 'Edit Mode', let's look at the last 2 buttons- Passability and Passage. These buttons allow us to determine 2 different aspects of each tile in the tileset (both background an foreground). Passability => can my character walk on these tiles? How about behind them instead? Passage => which direction can my character walk in on these tiles (crazy restriction, I know)?.

Taking a look at passability first, we can see each tile has a symbol. In the background/lower layer, Circle => walkable tile, cross (X) => cannot be walked on, star => the character can walk behind this tile, and square => kind of can walk behind the tile a little. This means in an area drawn with such square-d tiles, the character can walk a little bit underneath them at the edges only. This really only makes sense for auto-tiles, like the 2 square ones at the end of the 3rd row in the image below.

yeehaw

The symbols are the same for the foreground/upper layer except that there is no square.

Click around on the tiles a bit and check out which symbols can be applied to which tiles- not all tiles can have all symbols as options.

Coming to passage, the process is the same. You'll see each tile has a set of 4 arrows or dots - dots meaning the character cannot walk in that direction, and arrows meaning they can walk in that direction. You can click on each arrow on a tile to switch between the 2 settings.

One thing to note is, if you set the passage of a tile with 4 dots to even 1 arrow, you'll see the passability of that tile will auto-update to reflect that it is now in fact walkable. And vice versa.

Finally (finally!), the last panel, or the terrain panel.

The system maintains a list of all the terrain types and their characteristics that you define for your game. By characteristics, I mean things like does the player get damaged while walking on this type of terrain? If so, what kind of damage and how much? As you can see, the defaults already have quite a large number of terrain types.

On this (tileset) tab, you can assign specific terrain-type properties to individual tiles. This is only for background tiles. Simply click on a terrain type from the list on the right, and click on the tiles you want to assign that terrain's properties to. You'll see the number on that tile change to the number of the terrain from the list. Correspondingly, you can look at what numbers are already on each tile to see which terrain type the number is referring to (ergo, which terrain characteristics each tile has).

Finally finally (this time's final for sure, I promise), let's take a quick look at the terrain tab in the database. This one is fairly simple, you can set damage/recovery (values can be between -10 and 10, with negative values indicating recovery), encounter rate, character sprite display and whether or not your player's vehicle can pass over the terrain. You can even set the battle terrain graphic that is displayed here when battles occur.

A little note on the encounter rate field - this value can be between 0 and 500, and indicates the relative frequency of random monster encounters on any areas of this terrain-type on a map with respect to the encounter rate that is set for that map. Map-level encounter rates can be set on the map properties dialog; I'll touch upon that in later posts but it's again a fairly straightforward setting once you know where to find it.

Enough theory for now (the end of this post is finally in sight!).

With all this information in mind, we can double check to make sure the background tiles we've used are walkable, and the foreground elements are at the right level, without needing to test it all one by one with a test playthrough of the screen.

Let's fix up any buggy passability issues on our map now. Remember how I'd used bridge tiles for making Chester's hut?

Yep, most of those tiles are definitely walkable. And I don't want my chicken trotting all over the walls like a spider. No, that's a talent reserved for SpiderChicken, his distant 4th cousin by marriage. So for now, I'm going to put Xs on all those bridge tiles to make sure they are not passable.

This means, importantly, that these tiles will no longer be passable wherever they are used in the game. I'm fine with that, so yeah. There is another way to block Chester from walking on walls using events but oh boy we do not need to get into events right now. Let's ease into the fun parts of the editor first.

Now all Chester can do with the walls of his hut is headbutt them!

And that's a wrap. That's all of the visual basics done right there. Hurray!

I'd recommend a quick test play of the screen again, just to see the glory of your drawn map in a game window. Take the time now to explore the map drawing aspects for a bit and get comfortable with tilesets and terrains, if needed.

The next post will cover events (w00h00!), the backbone of any RPG.

See you again,

The Rebel Moose