AuthorTopic: Tightening up some game tiles.  (Read 3782 times)

Offline Soundlust

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Tightening up some game tiles.

on: April 21, 2013, 03:30:06 am


I made a top-down dungeon crawling, wannabe roguelike, for a 48hour challenge.
I enjoyed the idea and wanted to go back and tighten everything up, so here is one of
the 7 tilesets re-done and cleaned up. As you progress downward, it goes through the
various tilesets.


The hard part for me was the limitations so explaining those might help guide suggestions.
The game is randomly generated so, this isn't an in-game layout its just a screen with all the pieces.
There are only 2 options, a tile a player can walk over and a tile the player can't. So I tried to think
of as many ways to play with this 'on' and 'off' setup as I could. Oh! And the tiles are 16x16.
« Last Edit: April 21, 2013, 09:30:57 am by Soundlust »

Offline Mathias

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Re: Tightening up some game tiles.

Reply #1 on: April 21, 2013, 06:09:21 am
Overall impression is dark and dingy. Weak contrast. If the sprites are more brightly colored, this could work to your benefit by making them pop.

Your grid is very obvious. Very square. There are many tricks you may employ to "break up the grid". Or, you may want the grid clearly evident. I don't know.

The upper-most row tiles -  what is that? A wall? The vertical yellow bars are ambiguous; can't tell what they are. Tiny doors? Barred windows?

Is that water, or 3 pits?

Offline AteOneZero

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Re: Tightening up some game tiles.

Reply #2 on: April 21, 2013, 08:07:01 am

1 - Are these trophies? Your scene looks like a cemetery so I'm not sure if these are misplaced.
2 - Couldn't really tell what these were until I looked closer
3 - The bridge starts and ends very abruptly. I think the start and the end should be full planks.

Most of the other issues are covered by Mathias. Would love to see a sample character sprite to go along with the scene.

And also, try adding some rounded corners for the grass platform in the middle of the bridge and edges of the water, maybe?

Offline Soundlust

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Re: Tightening up some game tiles.

Reply #3 on: April 21, 2013, 09:41:47 am
Thanks for the critiques.
Mattias, yeah...it is pretty dark and dingy. I did try to make the character and enemies much brighter, but I don't know if it justifies
such a muddy palette. I can go back in and tweak some colors. I stuck so much to the grid because I just couldn't do any better pretty much.
If I could break up the grid a bit I would like to, any suggestions for how to do that when I don't have control over where tiles are placed?
And yeah, it's supposed to be a wall, ....the vertical bars... in my head I was going for barred windows but they look pretty ambiguous looking at
them now.

AteOneZero, there is a mini-boss that goes with each tileset. you go through so many levels, you fight a boss. I was trying to go for statues-kinda?
I threw the boss in the sprites I added to the first post for reference.

I edited first post and put a few of the sprites for the tiles in there. I'm not sure I like the colors of the tiles anymore now that mattias brought it up, but I
was trying to play up the saturation on the sprites from the background. And I'll get to work making a better transition for the bridges. Should I scrap the statue-idea alltogether?
« Last Edit: April 21, 2013, 09:43:20 am by Soundlust »

Offline AteOneZero

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Re: Tightening up some game tiles.

Reply #4 on: April 21, 2013, 10:25:42 am
Hm, I wouldn't say to scrap the statue idea but try to make it more clear. I really couldn't tell that it was a person until I just zoomed in. When I look at it at 100% it just seems like a trophy cup to me.

I went ahead and threw in a bunch of the sprites. I fitted some of them to a 16x16 tile grid and some of them I offset a little.


  • Your boss/giant is taller than the top wall tile. I don't think this would look too good. Maybe you should heighten the wall?
  • On the bridge, it looks very weird if you do not offset the character's position because they are walking on its edge.
  • Similarly, the dirt tile has the same issue but because the background grid isn't so visible it isn't too big of an issue.

Regarding colours: I'm not very good at it so I don't know how to critique it, but I've heard people saying that it's easier to see the contrast when you grayscale. Might be easier for you to see if your characters really stand out or if you need to do any colour tweaking. :)

I think that's about it from me. Not sure what else I could offer at this point. Keep at it!

Offline Pix3M

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Re: Tightening up some game tiles.

Reply #5 on: April 21, 2013, 05:04:19 pm
Depending on the game, you want a grid to be there. If character positions are aligned to a grid like traditional rogue-likes there is no need to destroy the grid.