How Many Colors Does Your Game Actually Need?

Tiles buy cheap repetition and cheap editing. When a project needs neither, here is what to build instead, including the hybrid nobody writes about.

Almost every seam you see is not in the art file. Symptom to cause to fix, cheapest test first, then what autotiling does and does not solve.

Derive the grid from your character, not from tradition. What tile size propagates into, and what changing it mid-project actually costs.

Authoring the layers and running the parallax are two different jobs, and most tools only do one. Here is which side each entry sits on.

A tileset is a combinatorial system with an art surface. Adjacency is the real cost, and decoration above the grid is what keeps the count down.

Ten diagnosable faults, each with the symptom you would notice, the reason it happens, and the fix. Most of them are structure rather than painting.

Two questions, not one. Authoring resolution is about headroom, shipping resolution is about memory, and the gap between them is measured here.

Layering fixes readability, parallax fixes depth. The band model, the four causes of parallax sickness, and when to skip it entirely.