Tilemap Town
Tilemap Town is an online, browser MMORPG built primarily around casual chat, role-play, and user designed graphics. The game was made by the Super Nintendo developer and artist named NovaSquirrel starting in 2017. The game as of 2025 typically has around 5-6 regular players. The game's code, both the server and the client, is also open-source, released under a GNU copyleft license. A minority of the game's graphical assets are not released under a free license.
The game's primary inspiration is an old "BYOND" ("Build Your Own Net Dream") game named Icon Ultima.[1]
Tileset focus[edit | edit source]
The game consists of users jumping across tilemaps of 16x16 pixel terrain tiles which are pulled from PNG tilesets. As such, player movement isn't smooth, jumping 16 pixels up, down, left, or right with each movement.
There may be an arbitrary number of object tiles on top of any terrain tile. Users can change individual terrain tiles or place object tiles on top of terrain tiles using a default tileset or their own, custom, uploaded tilesets. Object tiles are the same size as terrain tiles and as such can be pulled from the same tileset as terrain tiles.
Terrain tiles can be configured as blocking player movement or as non-blocking. Players also have the option to ignore these configurations and treat all terrain tiles as non-blocking.
Chat[edit | edit source]
The game is focused on casual chat and role-play. Users have the option to expand the game's chat to a significant portion of the right side of their screen, using 100% of vertical space. The in-game chat has a number of characteristics similar to IRC chat. For example, the chat is ephemeral from the user perspective between logins, commands are preceded with the "/" character, and narrative chat messages can be sent using a special command.
Technical specifications[edit | edit source]
A browser with JavaScript support, the TilemapTown3DS Nintendo 3DS client, or a MUD/MUCK/MUSH client coupled with the TilemapTown2MU gateway is required to play the game. The browser client side code is programmed in JavaScript and the server side code is programmed in Python. An optional server-side scripting service and the 3DS client are both coded in C++. As of 2025, the game-play is stable with few bugs.