Introduction to Tiled

Tiled is a free, open source, easy-to-use, and flexible level editor that can be downloaded from https://www.mapeditor.org/.

Figure 7.1 – Editing a map with the Tiled map editor

The levels we create with Tiled are known as tile maps. Tile maps are very common in 2D game development as they allow us to create large maps or levels out of fixed-size tiles.

A tile map is like a sprite sheet, which we have used before in Chapter 4, Drawing and Animating Graphics. The data is stored in one large image, and we extract what we need into smaller components.

This is a very performant and memory-efficient way of creating maps larger than the physical screen size. If you were to try and make this with a very large image, the image would need to be loaded into memory, which may cause the game to crash or run very slowly.

Let's look at an example of some graphics from a tile map and how they might be used. The following example...