I hope everyone enjoys this one on large level maps. This lesson could almost be thought of as part one of a multi-part lesson, as we still need to do the camera, level collision etc. Next week's will be about converting graphics from SNES to the MD and using this to create you own level maps.

I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Hirokazu Yasuhara, who among other things was responsible for the layout of the levels of Sonic 1. I recall he said that in the engine Yuji Naka had created, each level was limited to I think 32 types of segments, each about the size of one screen horizontally and two screens vertically. I may not be remembering this perfectly, but the gist is, the repetition in the stages isn't laziness of copying and pasting groups of tiles around, it was to get around some limitation in getting a big map to work well. I don't know what this limiting factor is exactly, but I also know that there's a bunch of hidden tile data that exists just for the physics of the undulating ground, so maybe with that added in as well, some bottleneck is reached.

Fantastic, it's amazing how devs back in the day could make so much with the little that they have. Great video AND explanation, Pigsy! Keep up, brother! 💪

Why is this more fascinating than anything going on with "AAA" games? Also, you're making more progress than Microsoft's "AAAA" studio...

Thanks for the tutorial, I didn't even know that SGDK would automatically generate the tileset, I thought it would just show a big picture on the screen and that would be all lol

Top notch content as usual

Aseprite 1.3 (now in RC) has tile support, which should make building such maps much easier.

I don't quite understand all that, I am in no way a developper but still interested and anyway here is a comment for the algo and to thank you for being passionate on what you are doing. GG

Thanks for this! Impressed by how much easier this stuff has become since I last poked around SGDK four or five years ago, as I remember having to do a lot of the leg work myself when it came to creating tile sets and setting up smooth scrolling beyond the dimensions of a single plane. Really great improvement. Given that the map you've set up here is just the foreground, how would you go about setting up a background in the same dimensions? Would it be a case of creating a separate image with just the background tiles, defining that as a separate tileset in resources, and then defining / displaying a second map alongside the first, but with its own palette specified and on the other background layer?

Very nice and straight forward video mate ! Next one will probably be about... map collision ? :)

Thanks for all those tutorials 😊

Yoooo! This is exactly what I needed!!!! Thanks!

Great tutorial as always

Im not a coder ....well except BASIC lol. I found this very interesting though. I really hope your port of castlvania eventually makes it, along with GG shinobi.

Yes Pigsy!! Thank you!!!

for anyone getting the error: pixel at position [6278,5] uses a color not present in palette. when trying to define the TILESET in resources.res you may need to go into Asprite and upload the map png, at the top, click sprite > color mode > indexed. then save the file and recompile that fixed the error for me. for some reason it was set to RGB for me and it gave me a bit of a headache trying to figure out what went wrong because I followed the videos instructions exactly.

Repetetive tiling a signature feature in the look of many european developed games of the time.

Thanks!

Nice!

man, you're the man.. I want to create a little game for my megadrive and my first move will be to take some old games graphics to mod them, see how it works... also i've just bought a" C language for beginners" book, as i just know a little bit of basic programming, do you think those kind of books could be handy? thanks

i shouldve known how to do this over 20 years ago and be good at it by now. my life sucks

What you did to vscode recognize "#include " ?

so when i followed the tutorial, the green hill flower/tree tiles sorta just corrupted and idk what i did differently (besides changing names but i dont think that's it)

what software did you use?

hey how's it going?. Do you possible port Castlevania Aria of Sorrow from game boy advance to mega drive? I think your work is incredible congratulations

It seems that the & symbol no longer works. While compiling, VSC just gives me errors like; "our_XXXX_tileset/map/palette undeclared (first use in this function)" and such. So how can one fix this in order to make background images to compile in the ROM?