Structured tiles
Yannis Lilis, Anthony Savidis · 2009
Tiles have been widely used in 2d games as highly recurring primitive small-sized elements used to structure large terrains. In many categories of board games repeating path-patterns are commonly used. In this context, we propose the notion of structured tiles as a systematic way to capture and such express recurring path-patterns. They constitute reusable building blocks of a far larger-scale compared to primitive tiles, embodying both geometric (for terrain formation) and path structure (for game play) information. Technically, structured tiles are subgraphs whose vertices are polygonal areas of a respective tile image. Through structured tiles, terrain composition is essentially graph assembling enabling to perform semantic checking like node connectivity and reachability, or other tests concerning graphs. Finally, common mechanics like plausible path computation, path selection by players, and in-path movement control are standardized and incorporated in the game engine. We discuss the notion of repeating path-patterns and introduce structured tiles, then elaborate on terrain composition and game mechanics.