#tilesets

The RPG Maker assets standards page shows how this is meant to be laid out.

These can be further adjusted in the database to be designated field or area type. If I'm reading this correctly this can determine how they interact with other tiles in the A2 portion of the tileset.

If Block A is "Field" then the transparent parts of the second and fourth tiles will autofill with the first and third tiles respectively. Otherwise, these designations seem to refer to how the tiles stack on the layers when mapping with auto-layering.

I believe "Field" is outdated and changed to "World" type in the most current MZ version I have.

Since World Type seems to be used for, well, overworld maps I'll go ahead and just make this Area Type and lay the tiles out without worrying about how the transparencies fill in like I would if I used World.

In short all that is to say I'll just paste my two tiles in next to eachother in the first two slots.

They look so lonely!

The beauty of things here is that I don't need a full set of tiles to start testing how they look in-game. I just have to have the ones I've made so far and can always save over this with a larger set later.

I'll go ahead and save this as Custom A2 and put it into the project.

Simply go to wherever you've got the project you're adding a your tiles to saved and open the img folder and find the tilesets to add your own. Make sure it's a PNG file.

Then open RPG Maker and open the project you saved the new tiles into and open the Database.

From here go to the tilesets button and the available sets appear. In this case I'll create a new set rather than just adding mine into an existing one.

At the bottom of the screen I can make room for a new set by changing the maximum and increasing it as needed.

Then find where you want to put the tilesheet. In this case I want it in A2 (Ground) so I select the image from the dropdown. Instead of appearing as the full image I made it displays the two tiles as just their representative pieces (the 48x48 section in the top left of the six-tile pattern that makes an autotile).

I honestly don't need to do much else at this point since this is just about putting them into the game to see how they look, but this is also the part where things like passability and terrain tags are set. They don't matter at this stage of the learnalong, though. I could also put other tilesheets in teh A1-E slots but I'm not worried about that at the moment.

Next I go to a map (in this case MAP001) and select my custom set for the tileset.

From there I can just draw the tiles I made into patterns the way I would the default assets!

Now, that took a while. While I know part of the time came from pausing to explain each step for the sake of the learnalong and that I'll get faster with drawing tiles with practice, it is important to take time to consider how long an original tileset takes to put together.

In other words, it takes hours upon hours to make a workable set of original tiles. If that's something you find doable then this post is also an appreciation of the time and effort that goes into it! It's "simple" in theory but it takes time and making them look good is a skill honed by practice. To everyone who puts the effort in: seriously, you all rock.