What challenges do you face creating a 2D tile based game?

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Hey guys

I’m new here. I’m currently evaluating different game frameworks for my next project (a 2D top down tile based dungeon crawler). I’ve made games before, quite some time ago.

I thought it might be worth getting the perspective of the community. What’s you’re experience with MonoGame? What challenges do you face each time while making your games?

I’m particularly interested if you’ve made a 2D tile based game before but I’m also looking for general thoughts. What I’m really interested in is what your workflow looks like. What tools do you use to create levels, etc.

Thanks for your time.

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The biggest challenge for me is ALWAYS assets.

I can code anything, on anything, anywhere, anytime.

However I cannot draw anything in an art package that does not look like programmer art.

Tried many times, failed many times. :slightly_frowning_face:

So I usually end up looking for open source stuff, which is always just slightly wrong.

They may be the wrong size, have missing items, have the wrong background colour, something is always wrong.

It’s still the same.

At the moment I am looking for a rigged 3D mesh of a pilot … well I need loads of them … but one would do nicely for now so I could write the code. Can’t find one.

Sigh.

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Right. I know that feeling. Every time I’ve tried to make a game without doing my own art I always ran into the issue of not being able to find something even if I buy the art pack, there’s always something missing.

These days what I try to do is keep the art super simple. Like low detail pixel art or even making the game intentionally simplistic.

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I have gone the other way, I went heavily into 3D and procedural generation.

I also use available data sources like GIS data for terrain, rivers, lakes, et al

My gui uses no textures, instead I have written a shader that calculates the textures in the pixel shader

I also got permission from talented people who make 3D meshes as mods for other games and releases them as freeware. They have to be converted into a file format I can use, and that meant a lot of reverse engineering :smiley: