How should create a map for a top-down tile based 2d game?

So far when working on tile-based games I’ve been using Tiled. The problem is that this doesn’t really seem to integrate with the Unity’s visual editor. For example in 3d I can use the terrain tool, which is simply amazing.

Having looked over some of the tutorials for tile based games in Unity, most people seem to place a prefab plane for each tile. I can’t imagine how that would scale if the world was larger and I wanted to edit a bigger part of it? With the 3d terrain tool, one can take a brush and simply “paint” large areas, much like I would do in something like Tiled, but afaik this can’t be done if each tile is a single plane?

I know there are a few asset packages on the store that add some support for Tiled itself, but from a short look they don’t seem to do more than just simply import everything at runtime, not allowing for much editing in Unity itself.


I don’t really want to use Tiled, but I do want to make a top-down 2d game where I can visually edit the world, and where the world can be reasonably large (say 1000 tiles width/height), while doing as much as I can from within Unity itself. How should I do this? How do people make tile-based games in Unity?

Also a secondary question, would it be possible to write a Unity plugin that extends the editor in a way that it essentially becomes something like Tiled? I don’t have that much experience with Unity yet, so I’m not sure what level of customization is possible.

I know its a old question but 1st, you dont need draw the entire map just only what the player can see(separe your map in scenes or just load what you can see), 2nd make your colliders statics (this means that they arent supose to move),3rd if your game its top/down you dont need physics so mimic the wall collision with your tile data(Blocked/free).

also just use a mesh to draw all the floor, or the base floor like if you are in the forest your base floor can be a dirt texture and just overlap the details of the scene with game objects.

remeber use sprite atlas to avoid extra draw calls.