First I'd like to say I've been lurking at this community for a month or so. It's a brilliant congregation of wonderfully skilled people and the great resources and tutorials they've brought with them.
I've made a lot of bookmarks already for my reference. Great stuff, guys.
I'm currently in the ideas/planning stage of developing my first game (also will be my first pixel art project).
I've got the basic gameplay features and controls locked down in my mind and on paper, and something I'd like to start doing, for my programmer's sake, is give him a basic tileset to plug into the 2D tutorials he's been working on in Unity. I'm planning on using PyxelEdit ->
http://pyxeledit.com/learn.php to do some tilework.
I've searched for info regarding tiles, here, but most of it is more applicable to overhead 2D RPGs. Here's a particularly helpful page, and I was wondering if someone did a similar break down for a platforming or Side-view game:
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=9865.msg107117#msg107117Anyway, any and all advice is greatly appreciated.
Visually, I'm going for something achievable on SNES, with similarly sized character and tile sprites.
Gameplay wise, I'm drawing inspiration from these games:
Spelunker:
Joe and Mac Returns:
Snow Bros:
It'll be a single screen, Bubble Bobble-style arcade platforming game, so I don't think platform types need to be very complex, though it won't always look as simple as a Snow Bros level, for example.
As in Spelunker, the player will be jumping, climbing, generally moving about in this way, so I think I'd like to achieve everything spelunker does with its tiles, though it won't be so congested.
Visually, I like how this game does things:
-1.jpg)
So yes, I'm just looking for your words of advice on working with tiles in a 2D platforming game.
Some general questions I hope can be answered and expanded upon:
- How large should a typical tile be, and can those then be combined with other sized tiles? We're talking multiples of 8, right?
- How many tiles, minimum, would I have in a tile set of a single terrain type? (I imagine, top of platform, edge top, edge, inside, underside, etc)
- How do you tile slopes?
- Are 'distant' background layer tiles typically larger?
I think that's all I have for now. Thanks for all your input! I'm looking forward to hearing about your experiences and suggestions.
Right now I'm still working with pencil and paper, but I'll definitely be posting my work as it comes along.
Oh, wanted to say I found this very helpful, so thank you vierbit for posting it
:
.. and will definitely be using these techniques for variation tiles.
edit: Also, any tips on palette choices would be great. I'm going to try to keep it simple.
I find most SNES sprites have about 6 main colors or so, but how many different colors should be on a single screen? I guess I'm wondering what the size of a palette should be for an entire SNES style game, or perhaps just on the screen at once.. I adore this palette
http://androidarts.com/palette/16pal.htm palette, but wish the 32 or 64 color palette was complete.. Is the artist still working on that? I'd love to see it
