Creating my open world RPG game has really allowed me to become familiar with the tilemaps. I will share all the important lessons I’ve learned from using them for 4 years.
We’ll cover optimization techniques for open world games, discussing the issues I’ve encountered and the solutions I’ve developed. I’ll explore scene tiles and why they need to be used more frequently, along with procedural generation techniques using resources to make testing easier. This includes working with noise functions for water and temperature systems. We’ll examine the power and powerlessness of tilemaps - how they make some parts of development easy while presenting challenges in unexpected areas. I’ll demonstrate serialization and saving/loading systems, showing how you can simply put in a resource and have the whole tilemap load. We’ll also discuss my obsession with cliffs (they look so pretty!) and explore terrain systems, including other plugins and their limitations. Finally, we’ll look toward the future of tilemaps, including tilemap layers and the possibility of each tile type having its own tileset for terrains, scene tiles, and normal tiles.