Designing a Tile Ripper copyright 1994 Diana Gruber Game programming is not all glamour and code, a lot of it is quite tedious. One of the most tedious jobs is preprocessing artwork so that it will fit into a game. Sprites, after they are drawn, must be measured and cataloged and indexed and stored, so they can later be allocated and read and displayed. A game programmer will find his development time greatly reduced if as many of these tasks as possible are automated. Sprite editors trim and measure and store sprites.
Level editors build levels out of blocks of tiles.
Your artist creates a picture and sends it to you in a PCX file, and you must break it down into the minimal number of tiles required to create the background. Small changes to the artwork would require the work be started over again from the beginning. Even if you don't make any mistakes, a job like this will take you all day. There has to be a better way. The answer, of course, is to write a tile ripper.