[WIP][C&C] 2D Terrain Tileset

[Blobber]

Hi guys,

I'm new to this site, and pretty new to pixel art as well. I've been reading a bunch of the tutorials and going through a lot of the posts here to try improve. I'm currently working on a tileset for a 2d procedurally generated game, and it would be great to get some outside opinions/suggestions.  The tileset is supposed to be top-down similar to the old final fantasy look.

I am fairly happy with the grass tiles, I think the sand could be perhaps improved both in the texture and the shore lines. I'm struggling to get a good transition to the water tiles, and the rock tiles turned out I think horrible but I really am not sure what to do about it. It is supposed to be mountain.



And here is an example scene using the tiles:



Thanks for your feedback!

[Neophos]

The shift from rocks to grass is really sharp, it doesn't look natural. Maybe the gray ground should fade into the brown more rather than just ending suddenly? Are the brown rocks supposed to be so dense that no grass at all grows through them?

Since you only have one of each kind of tile, some really obvious patterns are created. You probably need two or three variations on each tile for the generated ground to look good and remove the pattern (to some extent).

I think the beach to water looks fine, however, it will depend a lot of the animation of the water.

[Blobber]

I guess the intention was that the transitions would be grass -> rocky -> solid mountain where the solid mountain would be impassable. But thanks, this is a good point - there probably should be some clumps of grass even in the rocky terrain. And I'll make the transition from grass to rocky a little less pronounced as you say. The purplish rocks were supposed to be mountains, and that's the one I think I'll need to completely redo because it's not at all what I wanted.

[astraldata]

You mean mountains like those in oldschool SNES games like Breath of Fire?

Spoiler

Atm, those 'mountains' look like walkable rocky floors to me. I'd be surprised they weren't walkable if I were playing a game with these tiles.

An interesting technique could help your square-looking tiles stop accentuating the grid -- try making the 'corner' tiles in your transitions more polygon-shaped, making your landmass more diamond-shaped rather than simply rounded or squared like in the bottom left tile of the water-to-sand portion of your tiles. Each corner tile would resemble a polygon/triangle in shape more than a square or circle-shape. This will make your grid fade a lot more without any additional tile variations.

If you want Breath of Fire type mountains, the way these games made their mountiains (and many other types of tiles) is that they drew a single mountain on, say, a 16x16 tile and placed it in four places on a 32x32 tile (topleft to bottomright) and placed the mountain they drew separately in the middle of these (with the bottom mountains in front of the middle mountain). Very easy technique since, on the corners, they would just omit the respective corner mountain to give it that 'diamond' shape I talked about previously. Hope that gives you some direction.

[Blobber]

Thanks for the tip about the corners, I'll try redo them and post the results today.

About the mountains, I agree they came out looking more like floors. I forgot to mention scale here, the game is intended to be played from the top down orthogonal perspective, and I had intended the player to be 1x1 tile, and so I wanted each tile to be approximately 1 meter x 1 meter, so I think I can't put entire mountains on a single tile.  I did some searching and the closest reference I could come up with was this:

From http://lunar.lostgarden.com/



I'll play around with trying to redo the mountain with this reference in mind and repost.