Pixel Room Builder — free 3/4-view pixel rooms and tilesets from rules

NESW
Drag the sun, or use arrow keys.

Download

Room: PNG + tiles + Tiled map + JSON + text. Tileset: sheet + manifest + Tiled tileset.
Tap a cell to see which rules apply to it.

Layout as text # wall, . floor, space for nothing. Walls need enough floor below them for their face.
How it's built

The whole image is indexed art: every pixel is a colour ramp plus a step along it. Shading never blends a dark colour over a pixel; it moves the pixel one step down its ramp, which is why shadows stay crisp.

  1. Grid. Wall, floor, or nothing. That is all a layout stores.
  2. Faces. A wall with floor directly south projects a face onto the next one or two floor rows, the RPG Maker convention. The layout warns you if a room is too short for that.
  3. Side strips. A floor cell beside a wall gets a narrow faux face that tapers to a diagonal where it meets the back wall.
  4. Caps. The wall top is a pixel region that hugs any edge touching floor, as thick as the style says. Its outline and highlight are found by pixel adjacency, so inner corners, outer corners, doorways and pillars need no special cases.
  5. Light. Faces and strips brighten or darken by how their normal points at the light. Each floor pixel marches toward the light; if it hits a cap or a face within the shadow length, it is shadowed, with a dithered edge. Floor touching a wall base gets a contact shadow regardless.

Three styles paint their tiles procedurally. The fourth is stamped from hand-authored sprites, written as text with each character mapped to a ramp step. The only demand the engine makes of art is that it be indexed to ramps.

Not true 3D, and not pretending to be: faces consume floor rows, south walls show only their cap, and the side strips are a perspective cheat. Objects are out of scope for this prototype on purpose.