Have you ever wanted to use larger sprites on Pico-8 and it just got too complicated? Well do I have the tool for you!
Say hello to my MetaTile system, with tools!
While developing a game I created a meta tile system as well as tools I use to facilitate easier development. The tools themselves are very crude, but effective. In the following post I will show you how to use the tools and implement the system in a game of your own!
Download the tool at this link.
This contains a few files that need to be extracted to your Pico-8 carts directory. You can find that on windows by typing %appdata% into your file explorer and finding the Pico-8 folder.
The files contained are:
map_style.css (This is a very very light CSS file that just removes anti aliasing on a number of browsers. The upshot is the images are much sharper and easier to work with)
tile_editor.html (Open this file to start using the tool)
tile_editor.js (Fell free to spool through this file. It's quite janky, I developed the tool in about a day and didn't do much in the way of prettying it up for release. Please excuse the terrible code.)
map_tiles.png (this is a demonstration image that can show you how the tool works)
map_file.txt (this is a JSON file that contains a stored map and tileset. Read on to understand how to load and save with this tool)
A couple of notes before we get started, I made this in JavaScript because I wasn't in the mood to make a dedicated windows application. The upshot here is you should be able to use it across any system. As stated above the actual tool is quite unpolished, but it should still be useful.
Instructions!

This hilariously bad UI hides underneath it a powerful development tool!
First things first, you must go to your Pico-8 project and type the following in the console.
export map_tiles.png
This will create a PNG of your spritesheet titled map_tiles. The tool will only recognize this filename.
Let's go over the wi

License: -