Art

Man, I looked everywhere for a decent pack of art for classic 2d rpg perspective grassy island. And I don't know what to tell ya but either they're too expensive or don't cover enough scenarios for the price. 

I came across this one https://ojas-sabadra.itch.io/pixelworld for an astounding price.  The pixel art is half the resolution I was hoping for, but at this time, it's perfect and suits my needs.  Happy to help support another creator :) 

On the other hand, everything comes as a one arranged islanded png file. 

So I buckled down and bought Asesprite. I had a feeling I was going to be using this tool a lot going forward, but what sold me just now was it's built in tools for extracting individual sprites into separate images.  Now, the ong comes with about 1000 16x16 tiles, and I only needed a few, so this is what Asesprite let me do

1. Open the spritesheet image like normal
2. Use the grid and snap to grid for selection tool to select islands of tiles im interested in using 
3. Once done, invert the selection, delete the rest
4. Convert the result into a named "Tileset" 
5. Export the tileset as an minimized optimized tilesheet image file that ignores empty and duplicate tiles
6. File > Import > Import Sprite Sheet, choose my new tilesheet image, choose 16x16 
7. hit "ok" and the whole thing gets imported as individual frames 
8. file > export > export as, choose png with a name, hit ok 

Now instead of 1000 16x16 tiles, im only working with about 200, which is still a LOT to organize, but it reduced my workload by an order of magnitude Here's what my reduced one looks like: 

Mercifully the pack also comes with a little dude who can idle, run, and attack in all four directions so this little guy will serve as the cute player avatar for this game. 

Now if you'll excuse me, i'm just procrastinating naming all these.. files...

EDIT

Just thought of an interesting way to brute force this and not worry about it so much. 

I have all 200+ tiles sequentially listed in this directory, I can just get Gdx to throw me a directory iterator and I can instantiate a new Tile instance for each file, which the Sprite automatically loaded into the asset registry.  The number that I use in the map will simply correlate to the tile thats autoloaded. 

Now this is dangerous, if I mess with these tile files in any way, there's a change the indexing could get askewed or astray, causing incorrect tiles to show up in incorrect places. But for this things purpose, I'd rather do that than create 200+ individual classes.  Just get it over with. 

Edit 2

And.. that worked almost shockingly too well.