New artist - looking for tutorials

[ChrisKalydo]

Hi all,

I recently started working on my first game. Its a contra style platformer (for now hehe).
I have a lot of experience with photoshop and texture artwork, but not the specifics of doing tilesets, grid-based designs etc.

Are there good tutorials that explain how to plan and layout such a thing?
I mean when I look at the artwork it seems so organic, but I know they broke it up somewhere into tiles that make sense and repeat interchangeably. Once I know the logic of setting up a tileset, I can start focussing on making it look good, but I fear I will waste a lot of time making "nice" looking stuff that can't be used in tiles for level design.

Thanks for any tips/links!

regards

Chris

[Facet]

There's a whole bunch of tutorials in the linkage thread and I think this one in particular is a good general intro.

There's tons more on tiles if you search the forum (here's one started a couple days ago!), I'm gonna move this thread to the 'general' subforum shortly, 'cos this bit is for work you want feedback on. 

Edit - actually here's a post specifically about side-scroller tiling. and you could look at the tile-sheets from commercial games too.

[ChrisKalydo]

Hi thanks for those links, some of them i already checked out.

In particular I was curious about > is there a workflow, steps that people take when creating a background tileset?
So far Im stuck trying to get my head around things like:

- my character is 64x64 px > so how high should my platforms be
- should I block out the shapes first and playtest it?
- then go in and change those blocks into something creative/artistic
- should a tileset be in a texture power of two, or doesn't it matter
- etc

I tried googling but not much came up, aside from the articles you mentioned which deal about the art/shading alot, but not about workflow / planning

hope I explain it well

cheers!

Chris