Hello everyone, I have been on and off again learning how to make 3D art and environments, but have greatly found it difficult to create a game by myself on the scale I wanted to. I have for the past couple of weeks have been getting into pixel art and practicing, and even though my art looks cartoonish and not like detailed like, I am getting better at it. My question is should I just make tile-sets or one big module sets? I have no clue how to set up a metroidvania set! I have looked on youtube and nothing, is there a place anyone can point me to? Im not familiar with unity too much been using other engines.
Anyone that can help me?
Look for a tile editor called Tiled. It’s really handy for creating pixel levels. There’s also a plugin for unity that lets you import Tiled maps.
Whether to do big set pieces (as a single image) or tile-based - it really depends on your game. Tile-based will save you HD space since you’ll be recycling your images and large single images as background takes up alot of hard drive space (and ram if you’re loading them all at once). The vast majority of games use the tile approach.
Depending on your game style though - single images can’t always be discounted. If you’re using a single image, you’ll have more fexibility for the design as you won’t be stuck on a tile-grid. I wouldn’t suggest this for a game of any reasonable size though as you’ll need to have a method to manually add collision - whereas with a tile-based system, you can build the colliders in an editor.
If you want to do something for mobile - use a tile system. Image based levels are impratical for moble unless your game is fairly smallish.
I’d go with tiles for a Metroidvania. They’re efficient and they’re great at evoking a retro feel. Super Tilemap Editor is really useful: