Isometric Tilesets

Continuing in the tradition of this blog being a random stream of consciousness and whatever I happen to be working on at the time, this post is about tilesets. Specifically, 16-bit era tilesets, and how to construct them.

This post is here specifically to lay down some ground rules for myself. I have decided that the individual tiles are 8x8 pixels, to mimic SNES hardware. However, since the tiles are isometric, it is helpful to create them as 16x8 in size. They can be broken down to 8x8 if desired, but they will nearly always be patched together in the larger chunks. Anyone familiar with the SNES classic Tactics Ogre will immediately recognise the results.

Having decided that, the next step was to come up with some manner of edging them. The visual effect that I wanted to achieve for a map was that of a flat plane, and each individual square of the map would be slightly raised. To achieve this, the following template for a single square works best:

If you tesselate these, it looks like the following. Note that with a few extra tiles, you can make larger, rectangular squares:

Alternative, you may wish to have a single, flat plane, but with the individual squares recessed instead of raised. To do that, the following template works best:

Tesselating this yields the following visuals. Again, additional tiles were created to allow for combining squares into rectangular shapes: