Building a level tile by tile is tedious. Every corner needs the right corner piece. Every edge needs the right edge piece. Every transition between grass and stone needs the right transition tile. Place one wrong, and the seam is visible. A single platform in a side-scroller might need twenty different tile selections placed in the right positions. Multiply that across a full game world and level design becomes a chore instead of a creative act.
Building a level tile by tile is tedious. Every corner needs the right corner piece. Every edge needs the right edge piece. Every transition between grass and stone needs the right transition tile. Place one wrong, and the seam is visible. A single platform in a side-scroller might need twenty different tile selections placed in the right positions. Multiply that across a full game world and level design becomes a chore instead of a creative act.
CraftMyGame's autotiling system changes the workflow entirely. Paint terrain like you are using a brush tool. Click and drag to lay down grass. The engine automatically selects the correct corner, edge, inner, and transition tiles based on what surrounds each cell. Paint a rough shape, and clean, connected terrain appears.
No manual tile-by-tile selection. No hunting through a tileset to find the right top-left-inner-corner piece. Just paint, and the terrain connects seamlessly. The engine handles the tile math that used to eat hours of your level design time.
Configuring autotile rules by hand is its own kind of tedious. "This tile is the top-left corner. This one is the bottom edge. This one is the inner fill." For a standard autotile layout, you might need to map sixteen or more individual tiles to their roles. Get one mapping wrong and the seam breaks.
CraftMyGame skips that manual step. Upload a tileset and the system analyzes it for autotile compatibility. It detects which tiles form corners, which are edges, and which serve as inner pieces — based on standard autotile layout conventions that most pixel artists already follow.
If your tileset uses a recognized layout, the system identifies every autotile-compatible group automatically. A single tileset image might contain multiple terrain types — grass, stone, sand, water — and the analyzer finds each group independently. No manual configuration of tile roles, no reference sheets, no mistakes from miscounting grid positions.
After the system discovers your autotile sets, you want to verify it got things right. Hover over any discovered set and a preview grid appears showing every tile variation in that group — all four corners, all four edges, inner fills, outer corners, and any transition pieces.
This preview is not just a confirmation step. It is how you understand what your tileset actually provides. Some tilesets include full 47-tile blob autotile layouts with every possible neighbor combination. Others have simpler 16-tile sets covering the basics. The hover preview shows you exactly which variations exist so you know what to expect when you start painting.
If a set is missing a variation — say, a specific three-way intersection tile — you will see the gap in the preview grid. That tells you the autotile system will fall back to the closest match for that configuration, which might mean a visible seam in certain arrangements. Better to know before you build an entire level around that tileset.
Your tileset contains grass, stone paths, water, and sand. Without per-set brushes, you would need to manually switch between tile IDs and remember which range of tiles belongs to which terrain. One slip and you are painting stone tiles where grass should be.
Each discovered autotile set gets its own brush in the tile palette. Click the grass brush, paint grass terrain, and every corner and edge is selected from the grass set. Switch to the stone brush and paint stone paths — the autotiling pulls from the stone tiles. The separation is automatic and clean.
This means you can paint one terrain type, then seamlessly switch to another. Lay down a grass field, switch to stone, and carve a path through it. The engine handles the transitions between terrain types where they meet, using the appropriate edge and corner tiles from each set.
The result is speed. Level designers who used to spend twenty minutes carefully placing tiles for a single room can paint the same room in two minutes. Iteration becomes practical — try a layout, tear it down, try another. The autotile system makes experimentation free.
Autotiling is not limited to the game editor's level designer. The same painting experience runs in the Asset Marketplace's bundle preview playground. When you browse a tileset in the marketplace and open the interactive preview, you get full autotile painting — the same brush behavior, the same tile selection logic, the same rendering engine.
This matters for two reasons. First, bundle creators can test their autotile-compatible tilesets in the marketplace playground before publishing. Paint some terrain, verify the corners connect, confirm the transitions look clean. Ship a polished bundle instead of discovering problems after someone imports it.
Second, game makers browsing the marketplace can paint with a tileset before importing it. Does the grass-to-stone transition look good? Do the water edges tile cleanly? You find out in the playground, not after importing the bundle into your project and building half a level.
Same engine, same behavior, same results. What works in the playground works in the editor. What you test in the marketplace is exactly what you get in your game.