As is standard with old games a tilesheet and a tilemap are necessary for building the levels. I have been working hard to create a dedicated palette with 10 swappable colours per level. Using this I have been able to create an indexed colour tilesheet. The tiles are 16x16 pixels.

To create the tilemap I am using Tiled, a great piece of software by Thorbjørn Lindeijer. A great feature is that the tilesheet can be updated live, so I can have Photoshop open and tweak bits and see it update live in Tiled. Very cool! I have used this to tidy up a few bits that looked a bit off.

Tiled can export a .csv tilemap file which basically gives you a bunch of number in rows that correlate to the 16x16 tiles in the tilesheet. We can import this data along with the tilesheet and rebuild it in our code. So you get something like this:

Once all the elements come together, the mock up below shows the exact assets we will be drawing to the Amiga screen (best viewed on a CRT!)

This mockup uses 32 colours and a 256x240 resolution (same as the arcade).