How are certain map effects achieved?

Good morning community,
I am building a 2D tilemap and don't want it to look repetitive.
I'm quite impressed by the graphics of Secrets of Grindea and asking myself how they created the curves of the paths and borders, the bridge and the background:


The problem: I don't find the answer
The path cannot be a combination of multiple tiles, can it? I don't see _any_ repetition.
Same applys from my point of view to the border of the mountain and also the bridge.
Would do you think or know? How can such a path and border be achieved?

Does anyone have general information about building a good looking tilemap? I'm searching since days for it without any real success.

Thanks, Boris

 

Why do you think the picture is a tilemap and not just an image?

Yes, a path can be a combination of multiple tiles. In fact, what you see doesn't have to have any effect on where characters walk -- in some cases there's an underlying grid that determines walkable places.

Jay

 

After reading the article at https://www.scirra.com/blog/112/remember-not-to-waste-your-memory (summary: tilesets the only solution, full images simply dont work) I thought that there are no single images used at all...
Of course I was also wondering about the background in the screenshot (the valley) which probably *must* be a full image... *confused

 

That article is talking about making an entire map of high definition image files as tiles.

Especially with retro style low-resolution, you can have non-grid images without trouble. Just don't make a massive world made out of high-resolution images.

The background and midground in that image are most certainly comprised of single images. The bridge is probably one sprite, the land mass is probably one sprite, the background is probably one sprite. Each boulder and tree, one sprite.

Tiles are great for making large scale land masses and reusing the same assets, but your game won't break if you use single images of reasonable resolution.

Also using Unity SpritePacker can greatly reduce the amount of RAM used if you group the assets that are commonly rendered in the same scene.

 

Thanks for the explanation