Tile-based games tutorial

If you’re one of those people who pine for old arcade games and hoard MAME ROMs, you might want to check out Tony Pa’s excellent resource on creating your own tile-based games in Flash.

Pa’s tutorials are clear and concise, walking the reader through every basic step from creating maps to dealing with movement, pathfinding and isometric maps. He makes the FLA files freely available under a Creative Commons license, the only snag is that they use pre-Actionscript 2.0 code for Flash 5. Tony Pa’s tutorials are based on older work by Klas Kroon, who has created any number of Flash game engines.

Don’t think tile-based games make any sense in the age of Xbox and Playstation 2? Then consider the hundreds of companies that have put good money on mobile devices being the next big games platform. This despite the fact that your typical cheap mobile phone has a tiny CPU and next to no memory, pretty much like an old microcomputer. And guess what games were popular on microcomputers? That’s right, tile-based games.