Tiled Environments?

pandamatrix7

I'm beginning to create artwork for my game and I want to create very large and nice looking background environments (stages). However I do not want to increase the file size of my game to much. Is it be better to create very large rooms using small graphic tiles or very large png images? I've been told in the past to create backgrounds using tiled images instead of one big picture but I am not sure how Gamesalad handles this. What's the best way to go about creating backgrounds?

firemaplegames

You will have to use a mixture of both...
GameSalad works with objects called Actors.
You generally want as few actors as possible in the Scene.

For what you're describing, I would make as much as possible in the background image, and overlay invisible box actors to handle the collisions. So draw out all your tiles and everything, but compress them all into a single background image. There is a size limit for individual images: 1024x1024, but you can have multiple images placed next to each other.

Then create the walls and platforms out of invisible boxes and place them over the artwork.

pandamatrix7

That sounds like a good idea. I think I'll give it a shot. However I am a bit curious about the "actors". How much is to much when it comes to actors. Will to many actors effect the game's performance if I add a lot of the same "stationary" graphics in one scene (like animated grass for example).

firemaplegames

That should be fine, but you will have test it on the various devices to be sure.

debugdesign

I would be interested in how this works as I have a tile base game in development at the moment. My tiles are 48x48 an at the moment my levels haven't been more than 1000 w/h but I am only on level 5 and I have just broken the 1mb mark. I was hoping to have 30+

does GS export the data like Cocos2D? I think it's XML

is tile support something that might be supported in the future?