The new tileset is coming together nicely. I made a “master sheet” with all the tiles to keep things organized.

I implemented a new material system for tiles. In addition to the visible texture, each tile had a lower resolution bitmap which defined the material at a given spot. This was used for special FX like bullet impacts that vary based on the ground material they hit.

I got rid of that and switched to a polygon based approach which plugs into Box2D. Material polygons are created as invisible objects in Blender and exported into the game.

I also changed the way fences are placed on the map. They are now baked into tiles, so map editing is much easier.

The metatile system is still in place but without the editor. I get enough variety from Blender & Pixelmator alone, so it wasn’t so useful. However I now use its multi-layer feature to draw the fences, because they need to have separate ground / shadow / foreground layers for proper z-ordering.