Building a simple 2D tile-based map editor
Who doesn’t love a classic tile-based game? I’ve seen many beginning programmers try to tackle a project like this, and unfortunately, they tend to use massive collections of image or picture controls to do it. This is hugely overkill, as it’s much faster to use a single surface and simply track tile indices yourself.
This demonstration of such a technique is largely self-explanatory. Click on the tile bar at the top (with either the left or right mouse button) to select a tile, then click on the large center window to draw that tile onto the map. Scrolling and zoom are fully implemented, as are saving and loading map files.
The included tile set isn’t especially nice, but I hope it provides a good demo of how you might start work on a 2D game.