February 13, 2026
Five tiles, thousand opinions
Implementing Auto Tiling with Just 5 Tiles
5 tiles, big drama: devs clash over auto‑tiling hype
TLDR: A dev shows how to auto‑tile game maps using just five tiles by separating visuals from physics and rotating pieces. The comments split: some applaud the neat technique, others say it’s a known dual‑grid trick or only suits certain games, while jokes about site “hug of death” fly.
Game dev Twitter and Reddit lit up over Kyle Dunbar dropping a bold claim: auto‑tiling a map with just five tiles by splitting visuals and physics, then flipping and rotating to cover 16 cases. Fans cheered the cleverness, but the comment section turned into a popcorn-fest. One veteran waved a warning flag: it starts simple, then explodes into headaches, cue tales of off‑by‑one bugs summoning map‑eating gremlins. Another crowd chimed in with the “we’ve seen this movie” take, crediting the dual grid trick popularized by Oskar Stålberg, suggesting Kyle’s spin is smart packaging rather than a revolution. Skeptics sharpened their knives: this is just the standard 16‑tile set with rotations, great for platformers floating over a separate background, but not the silver bullet for top‑down RPGs where empty space matters. Meanwhile, someone joked the blog got the hug of death, and a toolmaker popped in with a flex: Sprite Fusion maker here, implying the industry’s already cooking similar sauce. The vibe? Equal parts admiration for the clean explanation and a classic dev‑forum reality check. It’s the perfect tech drama: a neat trick, a credit tug‑of‑war, and a reminder that simple solutions can turn chaotic when your tilemap starts fighting back.
Key Points
- •Proposes an auto-tiling method that uses only five base tiles by separating physical and visual tilemaps and offsetting visuals by half a tile.
- •Reduces neighbor checks to four visual neighbors per physical tile, yielding 16 permutations encoded as a 4-bit mask.
- •Handles corners by placing the visual tile in the quadrant opposing the occupied neighbor on the physical layer.
- •Generates the 16 tile variants via rotations/flips of five base tiles: corner, side, opposing corners, inward corner, and full/middle.
- •Implements a mapping array indexed by the 4-bit mask; in Godot, alternative tiles are stored via atlas coordinates, and runtime placement maps mouse input to tilemap cells.