Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 18

Blue Tengu - Hex Tiles
In this episode of Blue Tengu’s Game Development Show, we finally get started on the game’s map by creating the hexagonal ground tiles we’ll eventually use to fill out the level and lay them down for testing. The information from Red Blob Games, mentioned earlier in the week, helped us get started on thinking about the math behind the hexagons. Once we had a size, we just had to draw out the basic shape and fill it in with some rough graphics to help us see which tiles were which.

The ultimate goal is to have a set of maps generated according to some rules that strengthen the exploration aspects of the game. By the end of this episode, we have the basic tile types (in terms of what they mean to the player and enemies on the ground), but we’ll eventually go on to make variations and add rules for how they connect up. There are going to be limits to how many hex objects can be held in memory, so over the coming weeks, we’ll have to come up with some tricks to keep things efficient.

One of those tricks is going to involve only loading up hex objects that are going to be coming into the player’s view, but we’ll have to balance that with the file I/O costs associated with loading data from a file. There’s a chance that doubling or quadrupling the size of the hexagons, or merging them into bigger hexagons when the player’s altitude is high enough would help.

Tasks Worked on This Episode:

  • Create Basic Hexagon Map Tiles
  • Add Hex Outlines
  • Lay Down Test Tiles


Thank you HEYAbbot and Pandabitz for the ideas during the show – they’re in the list, and we’ll give them a try.

Leave a Reply

Scroll to Top