Tiled

What Tiled is for

Tiled is a general-purpose map editor for two-dimensional games. It is not tied to a single engine: the map formats it writes, TMX and JSON, are read by Godot, Unity, LibGDX, Phaser, LÖVE and dozens of other frameworks, often through an official importer. That neutrality is why it has been a fixture in 2D development for well over a decade.

The Windows package is an MSI installer for 64-bit Windows 10 and newer. Installation is conventional, and the editor opens without a project wizard, a sign-in, or a bundled asset library. You bring your own tilesets and decide how the map should be structured.

The editing workflow

A session usually starts with a tileset: one or more images containing the tiles you will paint with, imported so Tiled can slice them into individual tiles. From there you add layers, each with a type. Tile layers hold painted tiles, object layers hold rectangles, polygons, points and tile-objects placed freely in space, and image layers hold large background art. Groups and parallax factors let you stack layers that scroll at different speeds, which is how most engines implement depth.

Painting supports brushes and stamps, a terrain tool for autotiling edges and corners, and a fill tool for large areas. Wang sets and terrains describe how tiles connect, so a coastline or a road can be drawn by dragging rather than by placing every tile by hand. Templates let you define a reusable object, such as a spawn point or a chest, and stamp instances across many maps while keeping their properties consistent.

Properties are the glue between the editor and your code. Any map, layer, object or tile can carry custom key-value properties, and those values arrive in your engine as plain data. That is how most projects attach hit points, collision flags or spawn behaviour to things they drew in the editor.

Export, scripting and limits

Maps are saved as TMX or JSON, and the command-line interface can export a map to those formats headlessly, which makes it possible to validate maps in a build pipeline. Tiled also supports a JavaScript scripting API: extensions can add custom actions, generate content or validate a map, and they are text files you can keep in version control.

The main limits follow from what Tiled is not. It does not run a game, simulate physics, or compile a project, so you cannot test a level's feel without loading it in your engine. The included example tilesets are placeholders, and any real project needs art that you own or that is properly licensed. Very large maps with many layers can become memory-hungry, though the editor handles reasonably sized levels without trouble.

Beginners sometimes expect a ready-made game template. Tiled will not provide that, and the learning curve is real if you are new to tilesets, object layers and coordinate systems, though the documentation is thorough and includes engine-specific guides.

Who should choose something else

If you want to build a game without touching an engine, an integrated tool such as Godot or GameMaker will take you further, because they combine editing and runtime. If your project is 3D, Tiled is irrelevant. If you need to place thousands of objects procedurally, writing your own generator may be more effective than hand-placing them here. Tiled is the right tool when you need a fast, standards-based way to lay out 2D levels and hand them to an engine as data.