Hi, I''m planning to make my first game as a practice in my newly acquried C++ programming ''skills''. I''m out to make a 2D top-down vertical shooter, like Xevious, 1941, Raptor... So, as an 3D animator by profession, I was wondering how to approach the problem of Level editing/creation. I will render all ships as Sprites, but I''m concerned about Maps. Should I make them as one HUGE pic., or should I make them tiles? BTW, if it is not to complicated to implement, I''m planning to make ground interaction, aka Throwing bombs! BTW, where are those dudes that created old-skool Shooters? I mean, where are they hiding on the Net..All those dudes that worked on Genesis, SNES, NES games...where are they? (—`·._--={ Keyframe }=--_.·`—)

I vote for tiles. My reasons:

Less memory usage.

If you use a small tile size, and a lot of them, you can get just about the same detail level that you could if you just used huge bitmaps.

Easier to make changes, both in the game, and in design.

Old school.