How do you go about making a background for a game like tetris? or Pacman! What program would you use (Photoshop Im guessing), and how do you make sure everything will co-incide with your planning in terms of size, correct location of barriers and walls, etc. Im completely new so be nice.. haha

Draw out the entire level first, then chop it into tiles..

so if my level is 100 squares (tiles) long and high, I need to make a giant bitmap of 1600 pixels long and wide and chopping them up into squares of 16 pixels by 16 pixels?
Cause most games use 16x16 tiles right?
How do u chop them up tho. I understand the concept of how to work with the background, but Im not sure about how everyone goes about chopping the tiles up and storing them so the bmp''s dont take up a lot of space.
Im a complete newb at all this so feel free to make fun of me as long as u explain what I need to understand to do.

Im fascinated by games like Zelda... where there is a huge background made up of a limited number of tiles. So I understand that you would use an array or somethin to plot them. But a game like pacman, where the background isnt very big, would u just display a giant bmp and set coords where the characters can and can''t move? or would u still chop everything up and then plot the tiles...!
Ack haha!!

might i recommend instead of drawing the whole image, draw the 16x16 tiles individually ... if youre going with a res like 1600x1200 size maps or something rediculously big, you might want to try 32x-64x pixel tiles because 16x16 is going to seem like a spec on the screen.

Why dont you do this... Take a 128x128 pixel canvas, and draw 16x16 tiles individually and place little mockup scenes on the 128x128 canvas. You can save it with layers so that you can copy, paste, create new layers as you need. Ideally your tileset will need to be very versatile... you should have special tiles where walls might connect in certain ways... basically think out every possible combination you can think of encountering, and draw a 16x16 tile accordingly. The hardest part about tiling/mapmaking is not actually drawing the tiles, its piecing together your tiles in order to optimize space and time spent drawing individual tiles. Then once youve planned it out and are ready to draw, save it as a flattened image, which you can then call your "tileset''... and nab a freeware map editor, import your flattened bmp/png/etc, and now map making is simply a matter of placing your already drawn tiles onto a grid. good luck, have fun, start small!