I believe she is using tile editor to make them, similar to mappy
http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php
Here's a similar topic on another forum, it got some decent responses you might want to look into:
http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1576
Overall, gamedev has a lot of resources for tile maps and such.
overall, as said, you are looking for collision and scrolling in addition to map loading, possibly others.
Hopefully this helped