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Atile-based video game, orgrid-based video game, is a type ofvideo game where the playing area consists of small square (or, much less often, rectangular, parallelogram, or hexagonal) graphic images referred to astiles 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 atileset. Tile-based games usually simulate atop-down, side view, or2.5D view of the playing area, and are almost alwaystwo-dimensional.
Much video game hardware from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s has native support for displaying tiled screens with little interaction from the CPU.
Tile-based games are not a distinctvideo game genre. The term refers to the technology that the hardware orgame engine uses for its visual representation. For example,Pac-Man is an action game,Ultima is arole-playing video game andCivilization is aturn-based strategy game, but all three render the world as tiles.Ultima III andCivilization draw the tiles via software, while the maze in the original arcade version ofPac-Man is made of tiles displayed by the game's graphics hardware. Tiles allow developers to build with a set of reusable components instead of drawing everything individually.
Tile-based video games usually use atexture atlas for performance reasons. They also store metadata about the tiles, such as collision, damage, and entities, either with a 2-dimensionalarray 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, lettinglevel designers create entire worlds with a tile reference sheet and perhaps atext editor, apaint program, or a simple level editor (many older games included the editor in the game). Examples of tile-basedgame engine/IDEs includeRPG Maker,Game Maker,Construct, andGodot.
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.
The tile-map model was introduced to video games byNamco'sarcade gameGalaxian (1979), which ran on theNamco Galaxianarcade system board, capable of displaying multiple colors per tile as well asscrolling. It used a tile size of 8×8pixels, 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-tiledframebuffer, which allowedGalaxian's tile-map system to display more sophisticated graphics, and with better performance, than the more intensive framebuffer system previously used bySpace Invaders (1978).[1] Somevideo game consoles such as theIntellivision, released in 1979, were designed to use tile-based graphics, since their games had to fit intovideo game cartridges as small as 4K in size.
Home computers had hardware tile support in the form ofASCII characters arranged in a grid, usually for the purposes of displaying text, but games could be written using letters and punctuation as game elements. TheAtari 400/800 home computers, released in 1979, allow the standard character set to be replaced by a custom one.[2][3] 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, which allowed up to 5 colors to be displayed by swapping between 2 colors via an extra bit in the tile index byte. Atari used the termredefined characters and nottiles.
The tile model became widely used in specific game genres such asplatform games androle-playing video games, and reached its peak during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras of consoles, with games such asMega Man (NES),The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES) andShining Force (Mega Drive) being prime examples of tile-based games, producing a highly recognizable look and feel.
Most early tile-based games used a top-down perspective.[citation needed] The top-down perspective evolved to a simulated 45-degree angle, seen in 1994'sFinal Fantasy VI, allowing the player to see both the top and one side of objects, to give more sense of depth; this style dominated8-bit and16-bitconsole role-playing games.[citation needed]Ultimate Play the Game developed a series of video games in the 1980s that employed a tile-basedisometric perspective. As computers advanced, isometric anddimetric perspectives began to predominate in tile-based games, usingparallelogram-shaped tiles instead of square tiles. Notable titles include:
Hexagonal tile-based games have been limited for the most part to the strategy andwargaming genres. Notable examples include the SegaGenesis gameMaster of Monsters,SSI'sFive Star series of wargames starting withPanzer General, theAge of Wonders series andBattle for Wesnoth.
