Using free gif tiles in Tiled and Mono game

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I am aware this may not be the most concise question on SO but I really need some point of start here.

I am thinking about testing my skills as a game developer (I am a seasoned business developer).

I have started a windows phone 8 project in visual studio with the mono game template. Just played around with some touch controls and so on, I am not very concerned about getting my head around the logic sooner or later.

But. A game needs graphic. So I googled a little bit and came up with a possible start. First I found this software for drawing levels named Tiled. Seems kind of popular, means there will be some kind of documentation and forum activity on the internet.

Second I found these GIF tiles which I downloaded. They looked really nice to start out with, especially when my drawing skills are zero. I measured the tiles and came up with the conclusion that they are based on squares of 40 x 40 px. So I created a new map in Tiled and imported a new Tile set and picked the CLIFFVEG which can be found in the downloaded tiles.

Finally my questions:

  1. The tiles does not seem to be transparent. This means when drawing some grass and then putting some mountains/cliffs the grass won't shine true as a background. The blue background on the cliff images takes precedence and shows upon the grass. Can I turn the GIF tiles transparent in some way?

  2. When finished my map in Tiled. How do I implement it in my Mono game? I've seen some frameworks mentioned in the documentation. Is this the way to go? My guess is that I can't use some framework based upon XNA since games for windows phone 8 doesn't use XNA no longer? Can someone point me in the right direction. How do I import my map into my game?

Thankful for any help, links etc.

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windows-phone-8tilesmonogame

1 Answers

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I'm not sure if your questions are appropriate for SO. Perhaps the MonoGame forums would be better. I'll try answer it anyway.

  1. There are a couple of ways to get transparency to work on your images. The first that comes to mind is to convert them to a different format. PNG is probably a good way to go, but this will require editing and re-saving each image in an image editor (e.g. Paint.NET).

    Another way to go, according to this documentation, you can set a transparent colour in Tiled when creating your tileset.

    Keep in mind that just because it works in Tiled doesn't mean it will work correctly in your game. That depends on the implementation of the map loader you choose to use. Do some experiments first before sinking a lot of time into creating your maps.

  2. MonoGame is designed as a direct replacement for XNA so any of the XNA loaders should work with MonoGame (in theory). However, you'll need to recompile the code from source and change all of the references from XNA to the MonoGame equivalents.

    I'm pretty sure I got TiledMax to work with MonoGame a couple of months back when I was experimenting with some ideas.

In the end though I went with the tIDE map editor and recompiled the xTile loader for MonoGame when I created Rock Run for Android.