I'm trying to figure out game types that use only a soild 2-d background (drawn image) for the whole set. Not counting spirites for people or enemies.

Are those older Final Fantasy games, where those backgrounds all drawn as 1 image? Or did they use tile sets?

I sort of want to advoid tile sets, since I don't understand how those are used.

The really old final fantasy games, from FF1 to FF6 (excluding the modern remakes) used tiles. FF7, FF8, and FF9 used pre-rendered images with 3D characters, afaik: static backgrounds, with multiple drawn layers so you could walk behind and under stuff, and with some animations drawn over it for things like blinking lights or sparkly water.

Tilesets are easy to use. Basically, imagine having an array that is 5 x 5 integers:

1 2 5 1 1
1 3 4 2 2 //Or whatever
1 1 2 2 2
1 2 2 2 2
1 2 2 2 2

Now imagine that everyplace a '1' is, you draw a grass image, and every place a '2' is you draw a dirt image, and '3' might be a rock, and '4' might be the bottom half of a tree, and '5' might be the top half of the tree.

Except instead of having a 5x5 map, your map might be 50 by 50 tiles or more, and you might have hundreds or thousands of different tiles (not just 1,2,3,4, and 5).

The benefit of this is that images take alot of space (each pixel takes 4 bytes when in videocard RAM), so even just a small 1024x1024 takes 4 megabytes in memory (much smaller when compressed as a file). Larger images (for even medium-sized maps) cost alot. But if you have a tilemap, you can build your backgrounds out of small images and do impressive things out of small amounts of memory. Plus, it makes map development much much easier and faster.

Another thing you can do is use freely placed images: the map is composed of dozens of images drawn at certain positions. A background, with a road drawn over it, some trees and rocks, and etc... with nothing snapped to the grid. So the map is composed of pairs of (position, image).

You're talking about Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX from the PSX, right? There where also Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3, Dino Crisis 2, Fear Effect, Alone in the Dark, and a lot more... all from the PSX. Some more Resident Evil games where also in other consoles.

There was also Parasite Eve 2 that had plain images for the main part of the background of each scene, but it had an effect where the backgorund image changed like frames in a video when you moved through the scene. Look at minute 10 here:

I had a game for PC called Time Commando that did that same effect.

Also, almost every point and click adventures are even today done with full static background images.

Perhaps he's referring to 2D games that use a continuous image for background, such as...

Rayman: Origins


Bastion


Visually it may seem like a single, continuous background, but what the game engine internally uses is probably streamable power-of-two chunks of the entire piece, such that you never have the entire background loaded in memory at once, only the parts that are visible and the parts that are adjacent to the visible.

However, disregarding the tile approach -- or any other technique, for that matter -- just because you don't know how to use it is not reason enough. Rather, study it and make an educated decision on whether to use it or not -- I'm sure there's plenty of material around these forums, or at least users ready to help you with original information.

SHouldn't matter if I disregrade tile sets, I have my reasons not wanting to touch it. I won't touch 8/16-bit either because I don't find the look to be attractive.

I want to make use of a 2-d background (either handdrawn or maybe pre-rendered), but I don't want full to make use of a 3-d background.