What is a tile map?

If you have played a lot of 2D games then you will be very familiar with tile maps. We will start by looking at an example in the form of the following screenshot:

This 20 x 15 tile map was made using the following screenshot called a tileset.

As you can see, one huge advantage to a tile system like this is that you can create large maps from relatively small image files. Tile maps are essentially a multidimensional array of IDs that tell us which part of the tileset we want to draw at each location. It will help to look at the images again with their IDs in place as shown in the following screenshot:

Here is the tileset with its IDs in place as shown in the preceding screenshot.

To draw the map we loop through the number of columns and the number of rows, grab the correct tile using its ID, and draw it to the screen. Any tile with an ID of zero will not be drawn (a blank tile). This can be seen in the preceding screenshot.