Experiment in building a maze out of a TileSet of scenes

[wjt]

@Stregoica777 is imagining a forest maze for a forthcoming quest, and I have been wondering about ways to add randomness to Threadbare to add a bit of spice/seasoning to our menu of challenges. Inspired by a talk by Jackie Codes at GodotFest 2025 I thought I would try making a forest using a TileMapLayer whose TileSet contains scenes that are composeable blocks of forest.

Here's a simple scene. It's 64×64 tiles in size, with the origin in the centre. It has a 2-tile-wide path at the north, east, south and west face. The forests are a StaticBody2D using an AreaFiller.

The idea is that we would make a few more of these, some of which only have exits on 2 or 3 edges; and then put them together to make a maze.

Here's a scene that contains a TileMapLayer whose TileSet has one scene collection source containing just this one scene. I placed 3×3 copies of the scene in it.

Initially I thought it seemed quite promising but then I looked at the joins. The y-sorting doesn't work correctly:

The scene tree for a simplified version with just 2 scene-tiles looks like this:

You might hope to just tick "Y Sort Enabled" on lots of things but no: you don't want the TileMapLayers in the child scenes to be y-sorted, only the trees.

I tried a little script that hoists nodes from the tile-scenes' OnTheGround node to the host scene's OnTheGround node, and this does work:

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: The Threadbare Authors
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MPL-2.0
extends Node

@onready var tile_map_layer: TileMapLayer = $"../TileMapLayer"
@onready var on_the_ground: Node2D = $"../OnTheGround"

func _ready() -> void:
	# Child scenes are only added at the end of the current frame. Force an update now.
	tile_map_layer.update_internals()
	
	# "Promote" all on-the-ground entities (which should be y-sorted) out from each
	# tile-scene to the host scene.
	for tile: Node2D in tile_map_layer.get_children():
		var sub_ground := tile.get_node(^"OnTheGround")
		for child: Node2D in sub_ground.get_children():
			var p := child.global_position
			sub_ground.remove_child(child)
			on_the_ground.add_child(child)
			child.global_position = p

		tile.remove_child(sub_ground)

---

The other thing I wanted to explore was whether you can rotate a scene-tile when placing it, and the answer is no:

This kind of makes sense because I wouldn't actually want to have the trees rotated 90°, and our tiles aren't rotationally symmetric, but still I was a bit disappointed because it would have meant that designing 1 tile would in fact give 16 options (4 rotations × horizontal flip × vertical flip).