Thinking about all the platforms Tilemap Town could be on... I'm maintaining web and 3DS clients (and two feels like plenty to me) but Wii and Vita feel like they make sense. Wii has the very cool bonus of letting you look at maps on a CRT really easily.
I thought about how an SDL version could be ported around easily, but the SDL support on consoles isn't very great. Most don't have hardware accelerated graphics, even on the platforms lucky enough to get SDL2. Maybe that's ok though.
I am taking care to make sure that the parts of the 3DS client that aren't 3DS-specific are reusable, so a port to an arbitrary platform is "just" implementing graphics and UIs, which isn't as bad as it could be, but it's still a lot of work to make something as complete as the web client. Even the code for implementing the protocol wasn't too bad, though it's not fully implemented yet.
Something that's fun about the idea of doing Tilemap Town clients for different platforms is that that inherently means that you can have cross play between them, and it's funny to me to imagine a minigame where someone on a 3DS is playing with someone on a Wii.
I really should try and implement some sort of minigame. It wouldn't be that hard to just write a little script that connects to the game and does some game logic, and it's intentionally supposed to be easy to do that. Bomberman maybe?
It'd be really neat (but really unlikely) if some especially old consoles/computers had clients that actually connected online (making them Tilemap Town, instead of just map editors with the same name), but I think in order to do that, you would want some sort of gateway that translates the protocol into something friendlier for very low end devices.
Though when I took a look, someone surprisingly already made a JSON parser for 6502! https://github.com/ppelleti/json65
The other issue with connecting very old hardware is that most of them do not have the ability to display arbitrary images.
I think one way to solve this would be to have maps that use a smaller, fixed tileset where the client could supply versions of the tiles that are an interpretation of them for the platform.
Or, maps where assets take some platform (or something like "2bpp graphics") into consideration, but that takes away from the cross platform fun a bit.
@NovaSquirrel It's always neat to see things that take a system not designed to display arbitrary graphics and use weird hacks to make them display arbitrary graphics (like doom on snes, or the game boy camera, both of which hack non-tile-based graphics into a tile-based system)
-F
@Felthry In this case it's tile-based, and the tiles are a convenient 16x16 size, but they can have arbitrary colors on them which is where it becomes an issue. Though you can always try to get a 4-color grayscale approximation, or something.