Introducing Map Projects and the Map Editor - Gamelabs Studio 2.0

Today we are shipping the biggest update to Gamelabs Studio since launch: Map Projects and the Map Editor. This is a full map-building pipeline, from creating a new map project, to painting tiles on a canvas, to exporting production-ready tilesets, map data, and rendered images. Whether you are building a side-scrolling platformer, a top-down RPG, or an isometric tactics game, the entire workflow now lives inside Studio.

In this post we walk through everything that shipped in version 2.0, how each feature works, and how to get started building your first map today.

Studio 2.0: Map Projects, Map Editor, and Tileset Builder

A New Project Type: Map Projects

Until now, every project in Studio was an asset project: a container for characters, props, backgrounds, and their animations. Map projects are an entirely new project type built specifically for designing game maps and managing tile assets in one place.

Creating a Map Project

From the Studio home page, click the New Project dropdown and select New Map Project. You will be prompted to name your project and choose one of three map modes. Once created, your map project gets its own dashboard where you can manage all of your maps and tile assets in one place.

Three Map Modes

When creating a map project you choose the mode that matches the perspective of your game. Each mode determines how the editor canvas behaves, how tiles are laid out, and what export formats are available.

Side-Scrolling — Parallax segments. Ideal for platformers, runners, and horizontal-scroll games. Your map is composed of layered segments that scroll at different speeds for a depth effect.

Top-Down — Tile grid. Perfect for RPGs, strategy games, and dungeon crawlers. Paint tiles onto a flat grid and build your world cell by cell.

Isometric — Iso tile grid. For tactics games, city builders, and anything that needs that classic angled perspective. Same tile-painting workflow, projected onto an isometric grid.

The Map Project Dashboard

Each map project has its own dashboard with two sections: Maps and Tile Assets. Think of it as your control center for everything that goes into building a game world.

Maps Section

This is where all of your individual maps live. A single project can contain multiple maps, for instance one for each level, biome, or area of your game. Click New Map to create one, or click any existing map card to open it in the Map Editor.

Tile Assets Section

Below your maps you will find all of the assets assigned to this project. These are the source images that the tileset builder uses to generate your tile variants. You generate assets the same way you always have in Studio: describe what you want, generate an image, and the result becomes a tile source. Assign roles to each asset: terrain, linear (things like road, railroad, pipes, etc), props so the builder knows how to composite them.

The Map Editor

The Map Editor is a full visual editor for painting and designing your maps. It opens when you click any map from the project dashboard. The layout is split into three areas: the Tile Palette on the left, the canvas in the center, and the toolbar at the top.

Tile Palette

The left panel shows all available tiles for the current map. Select a tile and start painting on the canvas. The palette also lets you switch between layers, so you can place ground tiles on one layer and decoration tiles on another without them interfering.

Drawing Tools

The toolbar gives you a set of tools for placing tiles on the canvas:

Brush — Click or drag to paint individual tiles onto the grid.

Eraser — Remove tiles from the active layer.

Fill — Flood-fill an area with the selected tile.

Grid Toggle — Show or hide the grid overlay to check how your tiles look without the guidelines.

Layers

Maps support multiple layers. Use the layer switcher in the tile palette to move between them. A typical setup might be a ground layer for terrain, a detail layer for grass and rocks, and a foreground layer for trees or structures that the player walks behind.

The Tileset Builder

Generating a single tile image is only the first step. To build a real game map, you need variants: corners, edges, inner pieces, and transitions. The tileset builder handles this automatically.

How It Works

Once you have generated one or more tile source assets and assigned roles to them, click Build Tileset in the project dashboard. Studio will composite your source images into a full set of tile variants, edges, corners, and transitions, so that when you paint on the canvas the tiles connect seamlessly. The status badge on the dashboard tells you whether the tileset is up to date, stale (needs a rebuild after you changed a source asset), or not yet built.

Exporting Your Maps

The Map Editor includes three export options, accessible from the download button in the top-right corner of the editor.

Export Tileset PNG — Downloads the composite tileset as a single PNG spritesheet. Drop it directly into Unity, Godot, or any engine that consumes tileset images.

Export Map JSON — Downloads the full map data (tile placements, layers, dimensions, metadata) as a JSON file. Use this to load the map programmatically in your game engine.

Export Map Image — Renders the entire map as a single flattened image. Useful for thumbnails, level select screens, or minimaps.

Side-Scrolling Maps and Tileable Backgrounds

We want to give a special shoutout to Darko Tomic for his thorough and honest writeup on using AI for game development. In his article Addressing AI Use in Game Development, Darko built a full Unity game demo end to end using Gamelabs Studio for the art. His feedback on the tool was direct and fair:

"GameLab Studio earns its place in my stack. Their workflow is built around consistency from the ground up. You generate a base sprite of a character, and from that base sprite the tool generates animations, and from those animations it generates the final spritesheet. Every step inherits the style of the one before it. When I built the demo I generated a taekwondo character once and then layered an attack animation, a dodge animation, and a walk animation on top of it without any of them drifting. Then I did the same thing for the enemy. The results stayed coherent end to end.

Where the tool stops being magical is in backgrounds. I tried to generate parallax backgrounds, the kind that need to tile cleanly so they can scroll horizontally without a visible seam, and the results were rough. You can see the seam in the shot below where the field, the trees, and the mountains do not line up across the repeat boundary."

— Darko Tomic, darkounity.com

He was right. lack of support for tileable backgrounds was a weak spot, and we heard him. The side-scrolling map mode in Studio 2.0 is a direct response to this kind of feedback. We now support both generating a single tileable background image, and the side-scroll workflow built around parallax segments: discrete sections that are designed to be composited and scrolled together. Combined with the parallax splitter we shipped in 1.7 (which separates generated images into foreground, midground, and background layers), the pipeline now gives you real control over how your scrolling backgrounds are assembled.

This is still a beta feature and we are continuing to improve seamless tiling, but the segment-based approach already produces significantly better results than trying to tile a single generated image. We appreciate Darko for being upfront about what worked and what did not. That kind of feedback is exactly what makes the tool better for everyone.

Map Thumbnails in Studio

One more thing: map projects now show thumbnails on their project cards in the Studio home page. As soon as you save a map with content on it, Studio captures a thumbnail so you can visually identify your projects at a glance without having to open them. If you have multiple maps in a project, the thumbnails stack and fan out on hover, just like asset previews do.

What Comes Next

Map Projects and the Map Editor are shipping today in beta. We are actively working on improving tile edge transitions, expanding the auto-tiling logic, and adding more export formats for popular engines. If you run into rough edges or have ideas for what would make the map workflow better for your game, let us know by using the feedback page located in the sidebar in Gamelabs Studio.

The entire point of building this inside Studio is to keep everything in one pipeline: generate your characters, generate your tiles, build your map, and export it all from the same place. No switching between five different tools.

Map Projects and the Map Editor are available now in Gamelabs Studio 2.0. Create a map project from the Studio home page to get started.