Added some yellows and oranges to the techno tiles, and tried to follow the advice.
Here's a quick room that uses all of them:  (Edit: whoops, nope, I forgot some of them)

I might add like, machines in the walls to break the repetition further, instead of just machine-ey surfaces.

I haven't changed the techno dark background and the cavern tiles yet though, those are next.

the new tile set:


the square floor tiles are a little lame, im changing them right now. The ones the alien is standing on.

Thanks for the tips! Its true that all this same pattern over a large area got pretty boring, followed your advice helm and adding large areas of flat color. Im making kind of stratas of alternating rocks and flat.

Also thanks Lurdiak, though I'm not sure there, I do see there is a grid problem with the dotted tile (And actually there is a MUCH worse grid problem with the background rock tiles: I left an actual grid of black on it by mistake, and I didn't see it until now! Like, you can clearly see a vertical and horizontal black line on them, look at them closely) it lacks randomness so a pattern can be seen, but adding some larger dots in the middle like you did might just make it worse, making the single tiles even more easy to pick out because an element stands out in em. I think I got rid of the grid now though, I reduced random dots to single pixels instead of 2x2. It stays sort of uniform yet its more random and sparse this way.

new-----------------------old

(I only applied the new tile pattern on the cliff below Pepito here (the green guy's name is Pepito how awesome is that)

ALSO! I changed some tiles:

most changes are on the cavern tiles and the dark blue tiles of the hi tech maze, where I used less of that third pale color and made them overall darker, and added some red to one of the colors used. Now theyre much less distracting I think!


Next step for these tiles is to add some machinery in the back. I will leave large areas of black and place some machines, maybe adding animated parts to some. They will likely just be drawn with like 2 or 3 colors so they dont stand out too much and arnt mistaken for elements your dude will be able to step on. I'm not sure what kind of machines I should put there though. Pipes and boilers or something I guess, or maybe weird nonsense mechanical parts, like huge cogs. hehhh castlevania.....


Also right now I'm encountering problems of another nature! Game maker doesn't seem to let me turn pixel interpolation off (both the "set_texture_interpolation(false);" or something code and the game options checkbox dont seem to change anything to it), so everything is sort of blurry, like what that new firefox version does to scaled pixel art. If anyone knows how to get rid of that nasty effect, gimme a holler!
I could just make the game set the players' resolution to 320*240 or something while he plays but that would only be a FINAL SOLUTION, since people with widescreen monitors would end up with nasty wide pixels, and its overall annoying when a game forces your resolution down to that extent. Any GAME MAKER GURUS here...?

im working on a platformer game right now, with game maker. Ive been doing some work on it on and off for a few months, mostly doodling sprites, but I've only recently started to work on it seriously.
I'll dump stuff I do for it here as I do it and also screenshots or mockups. Feel free to play around with them and give me them' crits!


The basic premise of the game is that you have a bunch of aliens that are stuck in a large, sick labyrinth made by a some unseen evil genius of sorts, and one after the other, the evil genius lets them try to escape. Im designing quite a bunch of aliens, but so far I only animated and programmed the movement of that green three-eyed one, so you will likely see him a lot more in the screenshots at first.

Heres two screenshots showing the two "sceneries" that exist in the game right now. One is like, high tech facility and the other a cavern.


One thing I think I might change is the tone of the background tiles for the hi tech-ish area. Instead of darker blues and greens, I think ill give them a red hue, so they really contrast more with the foreground tiles.

Heres a few sprites of the first alien:

Heres an image showing some of his states, which is something related to how this alien is controlled (all of the aliens have weird gimmicks tied to them, this one gradually turns into an horrible monster as he is exposed to a certain radiation. As this monster he is more awkward to control, slower and easier to hit, but his attack becomes stronger)


And heres some sprites for one enemy ive started to draw. Its some sort of walking mine.

Heres the explosion for when that mine goes off. Ive juuust finished that one and im pretty proud of it!


And finally heres a few other enemies I thought about and made quick sprites of. The first row are like, of the same "species" as the mine, but like, they shoot at you instead of just blowing up. The second row will be tougher to beat but slower guys who spawn enemies from the first row. (Maybe upon death or maybe every X seconds, or both, not sure yet)


I should very soon have some sort of technical demo playable to show how it moves and give a better idea of what all of this looks together. Movement works, just got done with some room transition problems and such, and got rid of a few bugs involving the cavern area's slope surfaces.

glad you like it Xeno-Striker! Im not sure if the "power metal" part got through right... first wanted to give the dragon big boots and maybe a vicking hat or something but didnt have the time...

Pixelgnome: Nice pic! Im sure Brock Samson or Ghengis Khan (or both?!) is somewhere off-screen waiting to tear that guys' tentacles off with his knife... and then crab ninjas appear out of nowhere and epic fight ensues!

Snake, awesome pic! I already cant wait for next years' secret santa to see what other uber piece you'll whip out! (you seem to be doomed to forever get video game related picture subjects... its your gift... your curse...)

Junkboy, awesome anim! woah!

Khris, nice work with the three mockups

Just have one more thing to add and mines' finished! whew, that was fun.
[edit] Finished! pmed robot santa...