Game Design: Tiled Game Boards

I've spent the last few weeks in dribs and drabs building a new game for Android. Lately I got deeper on what it means to have a 'tiled' game space display where you construct the appearance of the game space by arranging a series of graphic images based on what's needed for a certain level of the game. The idea is that you get essentially data driven graphics.

In my case the game space is a maze, ostensibly a map of a neighborhood. Creating these, still rather ugly tiles, is fairly painstaking both to understand what the tiles are in your vocabulary to be able to create a variety of game levels, and then to do the graphic design and actual image files for these baybies.

Here you can see a basic game space over three generations of my art work, from unrecognizable to simply ugly. You know I like my software to be 'beautiful' so the game designer in me is really disappointed in the good-for- nothing artist in me who is working for the other guy 🙂

If you look closely you will notice that the 'topology' of the game space is the same, just the images in each of the tiles have changed:

First Generation Second Generation Third generation