Tiles

Commandline tool that makes building tilesets and rendering static tilemaps super easy!

Features

• create your own tilesets "libraries" (ready to reuse)
• inspect, list and extract tiles from tilesets
• define a tilemap using one or more tileset
• render a tilemap as PNG images
• eventually add a watermark to the tilemap

Overview

Tilemaps are a very popular technique in 2D game development, consisting of building the game world or level map out of small, regular-shaped images called tiles.

The most efficient way to store the tile images is in an atlas or tileset

• all of the required tiles grouped together in a single image file

When it's time to draw a tile, only a small section of this bigger image is rendered on the grid.

Static square tilemaps

Square-based tilemaps are the most simple implementation for two perspectives:

• top-down (like many RPG's or strategy games)
• side-view (like platformers such as Super Mario Bros)
• architecture diagrams...why not!? 😏

How to use tiles

All available commands

tiles --help

Generate a tileset

Let's say you have all your PNG images (square in size, 96x96 for example) in one folder and you want to create a new tileset:

tiles compose /path/to/png/images/

By default the generated tileset (it's a YAML) is printed on the terminal. If you want to save the result to a file you can redirect > the output:

tiles compose /path/to/png/images/ > my_tileset.yml

Ready-To-Use tilesets

Set	URL
AWS Icons	./examples/aws_tileset.yml
Arrows and Connectors	./examples/links_tileset.yml

Lists all tiles identifiers contained in the specified tilset

tiles list /path/to/my_tileset.yml

Extracts the tile PNG with the specified identifier from the tileset

tiles  pull --id aws_waf ../examples/aws_tileset.yml

By default the PNG data is dumped on the terminal. If you want to save the result to a file you can redirect > the output:

tiles  pull --id aws_waf ../examples/aws_tileset.yml > aws_waf.png

Rendering a static tilemap

The first step is to create the static tilemap using the following YAML syntax:

# Nr. of Columns
cols: 4
# Nr. of Rows
rows: 7
# Tile size (Grid cell size)
tile_size: 64
# Canvas margin  (optional)
margin: 16
# Canvas watermark (optional)
watermark: Draft
# Canvas background color  (optional)
bg_color: "#ffffff"
# List of used tileset
atlas_list:
  - ../examples/aws_tileset.yml
  - ../examples/links_tileset.yml
# Tiles mapping (associate an index to each tile)
mapping:
  1: aws_lambda
  2: aws_elastic_container_service
  3: aws_api_gateway
  4: aws_rds_mysql_instance
  5: aws_simple_storage_service_s3
  6: aws_elasticache_for_redis
  10: link_vertical
  11: link_vertical_arrow_up
  20: link_cross_arrow_left_up_down
  30: link_horizontal
  40: link_tee_right_arrow_up_down
# Static map layout
layout: >
  0,5,0,0
  4,20,30,2
  0,6,0,11
  0,0,0,10
  0,1,0,10
  0,40,30,3
  0,1,0,0,0

👉 examples/tilemap_demo_1.yml.

Then execute the 'render' command:

tiles render ./examples/tilemap_demo_1.yml > ./examples/tilemap_demo_1.png

output:

Installation Steps

To build the binaries by yourself, assuming that you have Go installed, you need GoReleaser.

Here the steps:

Grab the source code

git clone https://github.com/lucasepe/tiles.git

Change dir to the tool folder

cd tiles/cli

Run GoReleaser

goreleaser --rm-dist --snapshot --skip-publish

you will found the binaries for:

• MacOS into the folder dist/tiles_darwin_amd64/
• Linux into the folder dist/tiles_linux_amd64/
• Windows into the folder dist/tiles_windows_amd64/

Ready-To-Use Releases

If you don't want to compile the sourcecode yourself, Here you can find the tool already compiled for:

• MacOS
• Linux
• Windows

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