The RectMapLayer class extends the regular Cocos layer to handle a regular grid of tile images, or Cells. The map layer may be manipulated like any other Cocos layer. It also provides methods for interrogating the map contents to find cells (eg. under the mouse) or neighboring cells (up, down, left, right.)
Maps may be defined in Python code, but it is a little easier to do so in XML. To support map editing the maps support round-tripping to XML.