There's a lot of wisdom and analysis out there about making sprites but creating pixel environments isn't touched upon nearly as often.
Most articles that exist on the topic have a focus on how to create individual tiles which I've come to feel is misleading in that it places the focus on making an environment one tile at a time, which doesn't seem to work if you're trying to achieve any kind of artistic vision for the mood and atmosphere of the environment using color and light.
For those of you who make tilesets for games, what's your process like? Do you block in colors and values first as though you're establishing an environment like a traditional/digital painter would?
The
Pros to this approach as far as I can tell are that it'd be easier to get the colors you want down and establish the value relationships in the scene and get the proper mood and lighting. The
Cons would be that it'd be hard to take these blocky shapes to a final level because unlike painting, blocks of solid color don't communicate the final scene as well - so much relies on the rendering.
(Tales of Phantasia example)
Another possible approach would be to draw out all the architecture of the scene exactly as it will appear in line art and then color and render it afterwards. The
Pros here might be that it'd easier to imagine the final appearance of the environment and nail down the architectural details, while the
Cons might be that it could be harder to visualize how to put color into it and it might focus too much on minutiae rather than nailing down the feel of the level.
Starting with an individual completed tile does have the benefit of giving you something fully rendered to work with which can help you visualize how the rest should look, since pixel art appears vastly superior with the full ramp of colors rendered in, versus when it's just solid blocked-in value.
Regardless of your approach, how do you manage color ramps throughout the environment? If you did Process 1 would you create ramps for each major hue segment of the environment, or just add colors as needed when rendering the textures in? How much do you think in terms of traditional painting where you make the piece complementary or monochromatic or analogous? And how much of that translates to devising ramps?
The entire concept of 'color ramps' is very useful for sprites but almost seems like an artificial and awkward principle for 'painting' game environments. Of course ramps exist in all game visuals but maybe it's not as useful to conceptualize it that way when creating tilesets than thinking about it like painting a scene.
How important is it to have concept art before pixeling a game environment?
I don't know if there's been much discussion of these things before but I haven't been able to find it anywhere. Maybe this topic is just mysterious to me!
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