Getting started

Welcome to this short tutorial. Over the next few minutes, you will learn how to use TilemapExtended from scratch, beginning with an empty project.

note

If you already have a project running, or are familiar with the basics of Unity Grid and Tilemaps, feel free to skip to the next part.

Creating a project

First, let's create a new 2D project from Unity Hub and open it up. You should be greeted with a basic scene like this:

In order to use TilemapExtended, we have to import it:

In Unity's toolbar, head to Window > PackageManager. Download and import TilemapExtended, which should now appear in your assets folder.

Before we start to worry about data, let's start with the visuals and create our scene first.

Creating a grid

In the background, I went ahead and created some (very) basic tiles which I intend to use for my Tilemap. Next, those images were imported into Unity and added to a basic TilePalette:

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These tiles are part of the rectangular example scene and can be found in the asset folder at TilemapExtended/ExampleScene/Rectangle/Tiles/.

In the scene hierarchy, I added a basic 2D Grid and attached some rectangular Tilemaps that I intend to fill with my beautiful tiles in just a moment.

Designing a scene

Using the newly created tile palette, I filled my various tilemaps with content in order to create a nice, scenic ocean view.

As you can surely appreciate, I used a variety of different and highly creative tiles, each with their own variations.

Now that we have the visual part done, let's focus on data:

If this scene was designed for a RPG with character movement, or perhaps a turn-based strategy game, nice visuals aren't enough. For example, I would want to restrict movement to grass and sand tiles and completely block movement for trees or ocean tiles. Or perhaps I would like to know if there is ocean on a neighbouring tile so that the player could perform a fishing event.

To add the data we need to cover all these cases, we're going to add TilemapExtended next.