I've been developing a very basic 2D tile-based game for my own experience. I read what must be hundreds of tutorials on what I found on Google with "tile based maps".
Almost every tutorial I see is an engine that reads a text file and loads tiles based on the numbers in the file, such as:
0,0,0,0
3,0,0,3
2,0,2,2
2,0,2,2
But what if I were making a map that contained several 100 tiles?
surely there's an easier way to make a map than by writing a ton of numbers into a text file? How can this be done quicker?
An idea I had was making the world a single layered image: A layer for the objects/sprites/characters and another on top of that for tiles that should be under you like walls, trees, etc.
Is this possible/worthwhile?