[WIP] Platform Game Tiles [C+C]

[Azuyre]

Working on some tiles for a platform game and was hoping for some C&C. 

This is my first time trying to make tiles so any help is greatly appreciated.

[r1k]

the way youve done the grass makes it look flat; how the dark part circles the whole thing.  To make it less flat have it dark on the bottom, and highlighted on the top.  Heres a quick edit

I also made the rocks under the grass dark like theres a cast shadow.

[Azuyre]

How does this look?


I lightened up the whole top and moved the highlight up more as well as adding some shadow below the grass.

[Cheetah]

I can just barely notice that maybe you lightened up the grass colors, but I'm not seeing any changes in the actual pixels. Did you accidently upload the wrong versions? I'm actually really not a fan of r1K's colors, but he has some good feedback. Right now your grass is essentially pillow shaded. Either get rid of almost all of the darker green at the very top of the image, add lighter highlights like r1k, or both.

[Azuyre]

I forgot to leave the old version in the first post so both the versions on the topic were the newer ones, I added the older version to the first post again.

I did change a bit on the second one but you're right that it wasn't really enough.

Here's another version:


I took out most of the shading at the top and just left the dark green outlines and a little bit of shadow under the lower spots.

[Ai]

EDIT: note that I wrote this message before you posted immediately above it. The grass shading appears improved since I wrote this.

First: your colors definitely need work. I feel r1k overdid it and changed the vibe entirely, but the basic point, that your colors are oversaturated and this makes the tiles hard to look at, is definitely something for you to take on.

Some other points:

* Your tiles are very similar: you are copying shapes with very little modification. This makes the fact that they are tiles more obvious (generally a bad thing as it leads to a feeling of fakeness)
* shadows on the rocks are inconsistent. these large lumps of rock cast shadow not only on their other sides, but nearby rocks as well. Some self-shadows (shadows that one surface of an object casts on another surface of the same object) are also missing.
* the dimensions of your tiles appear to be 18x18. This is an odd size and may not lend itself well to actual use in a game. Ideally tile dimensions should be a power of two, eg. 16x16, 32x32. If that's not possible, second-best is power of two plus a half (for example 2**4 == 16 + (16/2) == 24 -> 24x24, or 2**5 == 32 + (32/2) -> 48x48). These choices are easier and faster to program for.
* I'll back up what cheetah is saying: the grass is essentially pillow shaded. However there are more options than what he is mentioning IMO.

Here's a quick edit changing some of those things:

[Azuyre]

Thanks for all the tips!

I made some more changes based on what you said and some of the stuff you had done in the edit:


I wasn't able to make them look less tile like but I'm gonna try a few more things after posting this. I'm not sure how I managed to not put shadows in such obvious places I think it's starting to look a bit better with those added in, I tried something similar to what you did with the grass, where you use the lightest shade for highlights. I forgot to try changing the colors to match the ones you have in your edit though, they don't seem too different but it is noticeable, I'll probably change them in the next version.

I guess it might help to show an example of the sprites that would be used with the tiles as well:


The character sprites are mainly gonna be about 18x36 though that sprite is a little taller and not as wide. I guess it is pretty strange to be using 18x18 tiles over 16x16, personally I had planned to use 16x16 at first but eventually me and the other team members wanted to try slightly bigger sprites, after trying a ton of sizes I ended up on 18x18 for the tiles to match the average 36 px height of the sprites. The programmers seemed alright with it so I wasn't sure if there would be any problems.

Are there any specific issues you can think of that pop up when not working with a tile size that is a power of 2? Thinking about it I suppose a half tile might be a bit strange since it would be an odd number. I've done a bit of programming work myself but I always stuck to 16x16 so I'm not sure what could come up from a size like this.

Do you think 16x16 might still work alright with bigger sprites like what I'm using?

[Ai]

* Looks like a good improvement!
* If that light green wasn't supposed to be a highlight color, it seems too contrasty versus the next darkest shade. Grass tends to diffuse light more than rock, which typically results in a) highlights only appearing along sharp edges, b) softer overall lighting.
* powers of two: packing tiles/sprites into a texture is usually more efficient if your assets are power-of-two sized; Converting between tile and pixel coordinates is also extremely fast (2 or 4 cpu instructions, respectively). It's nothing too major unless you're targeting something with tight resources.
* Matching character and tile dimensions is hardly compulsory, but it will make things simpler to think about.

[Azuyre]

Made a bit of an update:


I've made small changes throughout the original tiles as well as adding 25 new tiles for intersections that might occur. I also made a few tiles for 1 tile thick areas. The programmer is working on putting the tiles into the game and making a stage where I can test all the intersections to make sure everything fits together well, as far as I can tell from testing myself they all should though.

My plan is to make it so I have two variations of each edge tile.

So in the picture above each blue tile would be replaced by an alternate version that could be used and still fit with the surrounding tiles, that way I can get a bit of variation throughout the stages and have patterns like tile 1, tile 2, tile 1, etc. across the edges. I've already done 2 alternate tiles for the center tile and 1 for the thin vertical tiles.

Does this seem like a good idea? Or am I just doing more work then necessary?

Edit: Realized pretty soon after posting that the left and right edges of the thin horizontal tiles at the bottom didn't match up so those have been fixed.