Tilesets/Creating Custom Tilesets

This page will teach you about the various aspects of making custom tilesets.

Opening Puzzle NSMBU in Miyamoto
By clicking on Tilesets at the top of the screen in Miyamoto, you can reveal a menu with the options to edit any of the tilesets in the current area.



Clicking on one of these will open the selected tileset in Puzzle NSMBU.



This window will allow you to edit tilesets however you like.

After you're done with editing with Puzzle, make sure to close the window by pressing File, then Save and Quit or simply CRTL+S, as just closing the window normally will not register your changes.

Editing the tileset images
The most notable part of a tileset are images used for the tiles.

If you don't want the images to be compressed, turn on Use RGBA8 in the Tilesets menu of Miyamoto. This prevents the image quality from decreasing, but increases the file size.

The images are aligned in a 16 by 16 square of tiles. Each tile is 60 by 60 pixels and the full images have a resolution of 960 by 960.

To edit the main tileset image, you can press File, then Export Image or simply press CRTL+E to export the image as a png.

From there, you can just edit the image with your image editor of choice.

A lot of NSMBU modders use Paint.net, which can be downloaded for free on Windows.

Alternatively, you can also create a new empty image, as long as it has a resolution of 960 by 960.

You can find the images from some of the tileset objects of the original game in the objects folder of Miyamoto.

You can use this grid to more easily tell where tiles are positioned when designing a tileset.

Make sure that the individual tiles of your tileset loop properly with the tiles it should connect to.

If you want to add randomised tiles, you have to make sure that they're horizontally next to each other.

Most of this process is within your image editor, so we won't really explain that here.

When you're finished with the image, you can import it to Puzzle by pressing File, then Import Image or CRTL+I.

Normal maps
Besides the main image that is being used, there is also a second image that is less noticeable in game, that being the normal map.

The normal map applies dynamic lighting to a tileset, essentially making the 2D image have the lighting of a 3D model. This lighting effect is mainly noticeable near light emitting actors like fireballs.

If you want to find more information about normal maps, consider searching it up on Google.

The normal map can be imported and exported just like the main image can, with it's own pair of buttons.

You can view the normal map in Puzzle, by pressing Task, then Toggle Normal Map. You can go back to viewing the image by doing the same thing.

There are certain programs and plugins to autogenerate normal maps, however these usually give terrible results, so it's even preferable to not include one at all.

The best result is usually obtained through making it by hand with your image editor of choice. If you've used parts of vanilla tilesets, you can use the normal maps of them, which are also in the objects folder.

If you're struggling on making normal maps or don't want to go through the effort, it's usually fine to leave them out.

Setting collisions
To determine which way the player will interact with tiles, each tile has a set collision.

You can turn on the option Overlay Collision to see the collision each tile has.

To change the collisions of a tileset, we'll be looking at the Behaviours tab.

The Behaviours tab is made up out of 4 options: To give a tile the properties you have selected which these 4 options, you can simply click on a tile of the image at the left.
 * The Core Type option determines the main behaviour of the tile. There is a decent amount of settings but only 5 of them are of use in most circumstances:
 * The default behaviour, which gives tiles a basic square collision.
 * The 2 types of slope collisions, indicated with triangle icons, which give tiles a sloped collision.
 * Explodable blocks, indicated with an icon of a used, wooden, stone and red block combined, which are just like the default behaviour, but can be destroyed by certain things such as Bob-ombs.
 * Damage tiles, indicated with a skull icon, which can either damage or even directly kill players.
 * The Parameters option expands the options of the Core Type option. The settings given in this option are different for each Core Type. Some noteworthy settings are:
 * For the 2 types of slopes, you can more specifically define which part of a slope it is. The collision of tiles will have the same shape as the icon of this setting.
 * For explodable blocks, the only thing that changes between the settings are the particles being dropped when a tile gets destroyed.
 * For damage tiles, you'd mainly want to use the 4 types of spikes, though the 3 different options of instant death are there.
 * The Collision Type option controls the solidity of tiles. The different settings are:
 * No solidity, which makes tiles have no collision at all. This setting is required for instant death tiles. Spike tiles will still damage you with this setting, which can be handy for something like freezing water.
 * Solid, which just makes tiles have a solid collision you can touch. This is the setting you'll be using for most tiles.
 * Solid-on-top, which makes tiles able to be touched from above, but not from other direction. This most commonly used for bridges and semisolid platforms.
 * Solid-on-bottom, which functions the same as the solid-on-top setting, but on the bottom side instead of the top. It's unlikely that you'll need this setting.
 * Solid-on-top-and-bottom, which is a combination of the previous 2, being solid from above and bellow, but not from the sides.
 * The 2 types of slides, which are slope exclusive collisions. They make you instantly go in a sliding position and unable to jump, but you can still perform spin jumps and climb them that way.
 * The 2 types of staircases, which are also for slopes, but they make you unable to slide down them.
 * For both slides and staircases, the difference between types (1) and (2) is that (1) has a solid collision and (2) has a solid-on-top collision. (2) can also be walked past if it touches solid ground.
 * The Terrain Type option simply determines which sounds and particles are used if you walk over tiles. They only matter for tiles that are on top of the terrain.

Making objects
After designing the image and having set the collisions for it, you still need to make the tileset objects which you'll be placing in the stage.

The objects are the things you'll actually be placing from the Palette. For more information, check out the Tilesets Palette page.

To make and edit the objects of a tileset you have to go to the Objects tab.



On this tab, there are buttons to add and remove objects, which are pretty self explanatory.

Though it's possible to make a separate object for each tile, it would make it incredibly messy and inconvenient to work with.

You can see what your object looks like in the bottom part of the tab.

Underneath and to the right of the object are + buttons, which make the extend the size of the object and - buttons, which make make it smaller.

You can click on a tile of the image on the left to select it. Once you have selected a tile, you can click on a spot of the object to set it to that tile.

With a 1 tile big object, there are 2 checkmarks above it. You can check both of these to make it a randomised object.

A randomised object is a group of tiles which are directly horizontally next to each other. For each tile of an object that is placed in the stage, the game will randomly pick one of the tiles in the group to load in.

To the right of the checkmarks is a bar where you can fill in a number to indicate how big the group is. You need to make sure that selected tile of the object is the left most tile of the group.

Another option is the repetition. With the option, you can make certain parts of the object repeat throughout it.

The first setting is No Repetition. This uses no special repetition and just repeats the whole object.

The next three settings function very similarly, just with the first being horizontal, the second being vertical and the last being both.

These allow you to divide to object in parts by setting lines. The parts between the lines repeat while the parts outside of them only stay at the edges.

The last 4 settings are for slopes and staircases. They make the whole object repeat, but with each repeat being 1 tile higher or lower than the previous one, depending on the type.

Upward slopes go upwards as you follow them to the right, while downward slopes go downwards. There is not too much of a difference between the normal and reverse slope types.

Animated tiles
There are a few animated tiles you can use.

Animated tiles are only available in the main tileset. If you open the main tileset in Puzzle, you can go to the Animations tab.

There you'll find all of the animated tiles. It's sadly not possible to add more of them, so we'll have to just do with the ones we have.

If you want to edit the animations, it's recommended to turn on All-Frames View, as this will allow you to import and export the entire animation as 1 image.

That way you'll get an image with all of the frames vertically next to each other

You can't change the amount of frames or speed of the animation. If you try to insert an image that has less frames, it will play the animation as if the bottom row is stretched out to make the right size.

The animations of the 2 types of brick blocks spend a longer time on the first frame and then go through the others really fast, while the other animations all take the same amount of time per frame.

Even though there aren't any objects in the tileset that contains the big question and brick blocks, you can still add new objects that contain their tiles.