Animated tiles… more or less

Tonight we wanted to make something simple and fun: animate the water tiles for DeadBox. We created a 16×16 image for each frame of the animation, eight in total. Each image is simply a translation of the previous one by two pixels to the left, in order to give the illusion of waves when the animation is looping. Fortunately for us, Tiled has support for infinite looping animations, so we simply selected the first image from my tileset, opened the animation editor in the tileset menu, double-clicked on each frame, and set the duration of each frame to 150 milliseconds. The result was simple but pleasing:

We know, we know… This should have been a screen recording

But, when we tried to load a tilemap with animated tiles in Godot, we discovered that animation is not supported in Godot tilemaps. There are feature request for supporting animated tiles both in godot-tiled-importer and in Godot itself (here and here). The second link suggests some kind of workaround that maybe we will try in the future, but as for tonight, no animated tiles… 😦