TDF – Reviews: Dungeon Tile Designer

The Dungeon Tile Designer is a unique type of roleplaying product from 0one Games that allows you to design dungeon tiles that are 6 squares by 6 squares by using Adobe Acrobat 6+ layers features. The product retails for $10.00 at Rpgnow, Drivethrurpg, YourGamesNow, e23, Arima, Wargame downloads, Paizo ... so pretty much anywhere you buy your PDFs. It was put together by Mario Barbati, O'Bully and Anna Fava.

This is not a set of tiles like many of the dungeon tiles products, it is instead a blank 6 x 6 tile that can be customized with predetermined objects. It is not a drawing program. The main part of the program (after the two-page introduction) is a two-page spread that serves as a tile designer. On the left hand side are 7 adjustable features and on the right is the tile as it will look as you print it.

You can change the look of the floor with 7 default floor tiles: blank white, grey stone, brown metal, green stone, very dark brown (too dark really) or white stone. The floors cannot be mixed or matched, a single floor style must be used for the complete tile. Though multiple tiles could have different styles as shown in the included demo dungeon. There are 5 grid styles (including no grid) that can be used to segment the tile into sections - they all use squares as their basic shape.

Once you have established the basic look of the floor and its segmentation you can add walls in the form of dark areas to any one of the 36 locations. You click a square to make it dark or click it again to make it disappear. There are nine locations (at square junctions) where circular pillars can be added to spruce up the tile a bit. There are 20 special wall designs that allow you to make small, medium or large rounded corners, or large sloped corners. It would have been nice if the sloped corners would have come in medium and small corners as well as it would have made it easier to develop diagonal corridors. You can add vertical or horizontal doors to any of the 36 squares, the doors are always shown as partially open. You can place a circular stairway in the middle of the room or stairway three sections across the middle horizontally or vertically. There is a print function embedded on the tile page to make printing easy - I recommend using cardstock to print your tiles to make them more durable.

The last couple of pages provide you a blank dungeon sheet for your planning. You would need to print out the sheet and draw your dungeon by hand but it helps to have an idea of the overall layout you want before you go and make up a number of tiles that don't quick match. As a consumer I was a little wary of the $10 price tag, but now that I've used the product I can see using it to quickly (depending on your computer) drawing up the tiles I need for this weeks adventure. I would have liked some small and medium oblique line options but I understand that there are only so many clickable options that can be stored on an adobe page.

Score: 7.5/10

Link: http://0onegames.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=26&products_id=184