never really understood the whole "gist" of making tilesets
It makes stuff easier because you don't have to draw everything individually, you can just place tiles
And you only need a few tile variations if you really want it to look more unique
like, what's the average size they have to be? 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, etc.?
Doesn't matter. It depends on the type of game, the average size of the sprites, and your personal preferences.
Sprite-based games like on NES, Genesis, SNES, Saturn and stuff probably used 16x16 tiles.
If you were making like an HD-resolution game, you would need to use bigger tiles.
If you were making a game that requires more precise level design, you might use smaller tiles so that instead of making so many variations on a tile, you can just piece together the smaller tile.
There's also a such thing as metatiles, which are basically groupings of smaller individual tiles, I think.
how do you make those land tiles? like the ones you can just put around to make a whole land map like mario levels
ummm i dunno
you just do
you put some grass tiles and some dirt tiles and some sloped grass/dirt tiles and you got a tileset
what kinds of things do you even include in tilesets
Again, depends on the type of game.
Like, in a top-down RPG or something, for the overworld you would have tiles for all the different terrain as well as transitions from one terrain to another, and a few tiles for different types of towns and such. Then, inside the towns/castles/whatevertheforgets, you'd have another tileset with stuff like roads, houses, signs, walls, and stuff.
In a 2D platformer, you'd have tiles for a flat surface, and for slopes (usually just 45 degree slopes, but sometimes less/more if you need those too). Land tiles would need a beginning, middle, and end tile so that they connect smoothly and the land stops because of a bottomless pit, it doesn't look as abrupt.
And of course, you'd need tiles for level hazards and platforms and different terrain and stuff, and different tilesets for each world. And you'd need tilesets for the background too (but for that you could probably just draw in an image or something if it's static).