Map Tilesets

By now you're probably pretty frustrated with the limitations of the preset map tilesets, aren't you? You want the Castle Town fountain in your Port Town! You want flowers from the Beach in the Forest! You want a statue of a chicken in the middle of your house! But you can't mix tilesets there are no chicken statue tiles. Fear not! For we can make our own, customized tilesets and import them into the game! And using the same method, you can export the preset tilesets and add to them with your own tiles or tiles from other sets! Huzzah!

Materials

First, let's talk filetype. RPG Maker uses .png images for tilesets. You can use .jpg files if you like, but if you want your tile to have any transparency at all, it needs to be in .png. JPEGs are ok for things like grass or flooring, but for actual, usable tilesets I recommend PNG.

So the first thing we need is an image editing program that suppports PNG files. If you don't already have one, you can download the free image editing program GIMP

Export a Tileset

The best way to work with tilesets is to export an existing tileset as a template. First, click on the Materials button on the toolbar (it's two to the right of the view buttons). The Materialbase will pop up with all of the materials the game uses. On the left side, find Graphics/Tilesets and select. On the right side, I'm choosing 001-Grassland01 since it's what I've been working on so far with this map. When you've selected the tileset, click Export, then choose a place to save the png file.

Now open up your image editing program and open the tileset png file. You'll notice right away that the background is kind of a turqouise color instead of the pale blue in the program. This is the transparancy color. The transparency color works as a green screen. When making tilesets, the developers made sure not to use that turquoise color anywhere. Then, when the tileset is imported into RPG Maker, the turquoise color is made transparent.

If your program has a Grid option, go ahead and overlay a grid with 32 x 32 pixel squares. This is the size of each tile, so having the grid in place will help make sure your tiles are in the right spot on the set, and also makes sure they're the correct side.

You will probably need to adjust the size to make room for any new tiles in the tileset. Be careful: Do not change the width of the file! You can make the file as long as you like, but the width needs to stay at 256. Anything wider will just get cut off when it loads in the program.

As you make the image longer, be sure to keep that same turqouise background color and draw on top of that. If you want more colors, there should be an Edit Pallete option. If you want to make a shadow, there's a darker blue color that acts as a semi-transparent color and you can pick it up from most of the shadows already on the tileset.

I found a cute little sprite of a rose, so I've added that to my tileset.

When you're ready to add your new tileset to the game, click on Materials again, and make sure you're in the Graphics/Tileset folder and choose "Import" and browse to find your saved tileset. It will ask you to click a color for the transparancy and semitransparancy, which should be the teal and dark blue colors.

After you hit OK there's one more thing you need to do to use this tileset. Go up and click on the Database button. Move to the Tilesets tab, and then click on Change Maximum.

We just need one new set for now, so I'm changing it from 50 to 51.

Now you should have a new empty tileset. First let's name it. I named my image crazy.png, so I'll name this tileset Crazy. Browse to find the image you imported for the tileset and select it. Now your new tileset should be there! Be sure to go check out the page on Tilesets in the Database to learn how to fully edit your new tileset.

Now apply your new tileset to a map and have fun! The possibilities are endless now that you can make your own tileset!

 

If you want to make your tiles look fantastic, check out So You Want To Be a Pixel Artist