For a long time now, Thorbjorn Lindeijer’s Tile Map Editor has been one of the most essential tools for 2D game development. My homage to Mega Man in Unity was created with Tiled and that editor combined with some hand-rolled exporting tools became so important to my development process that it gave birth to Tiled2Unity which is basically the only reason for my blog’s existence now.

And you know that super hot Titan Souls game we can’t wait to get our hands on? They credit Tiled as their favorite game-making tool.

Thorbjorn has done our hobby a great credit and I know from releasing Tiled2Unity to the wild that support and additional features can be overwhelming for those of us with a day job.

So let’s make Tiled Map Editor development Thorbjorn’s new fulltime job.

Tiled on Patreon

On Thorbjorn’s Patreon page he has 3 milestone goals:

1. $500 a month: 1-day per week focus on Tiled.
2. $1500 a month: 2-day per week focus on Tiled.
3. $5000 a month: Fulltime development on Tiled and other game development tools.

Even his first milestone would be a benefit to our game development community but I think we should give him the whole enchilada. At $5000 a month it’s a steal. Do you know how much it would cost a business to hire a fulltime, experienced senior-level programmer with a proven track record and a popular product to their name? The salary alone is in the six figures. Add benefits, employment tax, equipment, software licenses, etc. and you could double that expense.

I’d imagine Tiled has many tens of thousands of enthusiastic users so even a contribution of $1 a month from people that care should get him there easily. Please contribute and help me spread the word.

The way I see it, Tiled is our version of Photoshop and since a Photoshop subscription costs $10 a month then that sounds like a good level of contribution for Tiled. That’s what I’m in this for but if I could get only 5 of you Tiled2Unity users to chip in any amount and let me know about it then I’ll double my monthly patronage to $20. Deal?

We’re in a golden age of revisiting the kind of retro games that we grew up on and I want to see more of that stuff out there. That’s why I made Tiled2Unity free for everyone to use and why I strongly support Thorbjorn’s efforts to make Tiled even better. Join me.

Edited to add: I can’t believe I missed this but this past summer’s love-letter to the NES glory days, Shovel Knight, was also made with Tiled. See what I mean? This technology is totally worth getting behind.