Where to start for making a top-down, tilebased rpg game a la rpgmaker.

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Hi there,

I’m not %100 sure this is the right place to post this question. My apologies if I’m doing something wrong.

I’m working on a Pokemon style rpg game that has top-down tile-based graphics. It’s a bit like those retro jrpgs. I’ve found some tile-based tools in the Unity asset store but I’m not sure what to go with really. The assets on the store offer a wide variety of features but I’m looking for the look, feel and features you have on the old Pokemon games on the gameboy when it comes to character navigation, entering and exiting buildings and so forth.

Here’s an example screenshot just in case.

1280×1152 34.7 KB

I’d like to kindly ask for some guidance on whether you know about a particular codebase or an asset that can help me lay down the foundations.

So far here are the assets I’ve found out:
-RPG Map Editor
-Top Down 2D RPG Kit - Starter Version

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I can tell you what I know many (if not most) people do to set up their project and what they use for this, but it’s certainly not from the asset store.

In Unity you have to change a few settings if you’re working with Pixel Art this small. In Quality Settings disable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic FIltering. Then the next thing is that you should enable Point-Filtering and disable Compression on every single Texture/Sprite you import.
For fonts you either use TextMeshPro or create editable copies of your pixel font and also change that to point-filtering.
On your camera you need a script that keeps the aspect ratio in a certain way so it’s pixel perfect. Very easy to find a script for this on Google.

With that you should have the foundation in Unity for your game and could make it look like your screenshot.

To build the maps most people probably use Tiled Map Editor: http://www.mapeditor.org/
You build the map there from your tilesets and then use this Tiled2Unity importer to get it into the editor: Get Tiled2Unity

Tiled itself has a lot of functionality other than just building the maps - you can create collisions in there, specify sorting layers for Unity (see Tiled2Unity tutorials for that) and create placeholder objects, so you know where to put things in Unity.

With those tools you can very easily create a map like that. The rest is probably just making the content and programming movement and battles. If you’re not that well-versed just look for tutorials. I know there are a few out there.

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Good place to start: Learn

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There is an official tutorial: