# Using external tilemaps?

**URL:** <https://forum.defold.com/t/using-external-tilemaps/9032>\
**Category:** Questions\
**Created:** [June 8, 2017, 9:49am UTC](https://forum.defold.com/t/using-external-tilemaps/9032 "2017-06-08T09:49:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![sven](https://forum-defold.b-cdn.net/user_avatar/forum.defold.com/sven/32/1086_2.png) [@sven](https://forum.defold.com/u/sven)\
**Post date:** [June 8, 2017, 9:58am UTC](https://forum.defold.com/t/using-external-tilemaps/9032/2 "2017-06-08T09:58:22Z")

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Interesting, I don’t know of any Defold game that has support for custom user content yet, I think it sounds like a cool idea! 🙂

I would suggest that your users create their own levels(?) in for example [Tiled](http://www.mapeditor.org/) and export to an easy-to-parse format like JSON (I believe Tiled can export JSON). You should be able to read the custom “tilemap”/levels using Lua [io.\*](https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#5.7) functions, and parse the JSON data into Lua tables using Defolds [json](https://www.defold.com/ref/json/) module.

Then internally in your game you setup an empty tilemap that you at runtime can [modify](https://www.defold.com/ref/tilemap/) based on the custom user level data.

I don’t think there is any need to use either `bundle_resources` or `custom_resources` since with the io.\* functions you can read files from anywhere.

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