Blatant Harvest Moon Tileset Rip-off Mockup... Thing [WIP][C&C]

[Ambivorous]

Hello again,

I'm needing some help with a tileset. I have put off making a tileset and mockup for quite some time because I know I am not very good at it. This is me forcing myself to do one.
I've always liked harvest moon from the SNES and it probably influences me more heavily than I realise.

Here it is:


I do not like my long grass, the chicken just seems to small no matter what I do and my short grass may as well be copy-pasted from some generic game.

Things I want opinions on:
Should I make the fences a single post rather and then simply join adjacent posts with planks?
Should I add some grass around the bottoms of the posts?
Will I get away with the stone as is, or should I make it appear to be slightly submerged in the ground?
Should I make 9 versions of the long grass so that there will always be edge pieces around with a darker outline or something similar?
For the short grass, should I stick with something like this, rather add a few patches of grass/ground, add flowers, other [specify]?
I should make some dirt tiles.

And of course please help me with anything that will help me unify the style of the entire piece.

Oh also, if you want me to add something to the mockup let me know and I'll try to pixel it (something that actually makes sense to be in it of course, like a farmer, or a pumpkin).

[astraldata]

It really looks pretty solid overall. There are some minor issues with various things, but the most prominent is just how dark the shadows/outlines are around the bushes and rocks compared to the tall grass or even the chicken. In the grass you only use 3 colors, and the darkest portion of that color is much lighter than the darkest portion of your bush and rock. I wouldn't suggest darkening the bottom of the tall grass though to match -- it would really throw off the bright/cheery feel of the entire piece if you did.

To answer some of your questions:

1) No, the way you have them structured now looks perfectly alright -- otherwise they'd just look like isolated posts.
2) You could add grass at the bottom of the posts, but I think at this resolution, it would muck-up the clarity of your iconic description of them.
3) If you lighten the darkest color of the stone's base to about the same luminosity as the base of the grass, it would look mostly submerged automatically.
4) Depends on your resolution as to whether or not this would be necessary (i.e. how many tiles will you see on screen horizontally and vertically?)
5) Short grass does need some variation (i.e. alternate the color of the 4 grass chunk pieces and maybe make a flower tile -- not much else is necessary)

That aside, I personally think your long grass looks the nicest and most harmonious with the look you have going on here overall. It could be misinterpreted as a bush, but that has to do with the transition to the dark color in the base of the tall grass from the lightest color. The front just looks a bit too potentially rounded. It's not an effect that's too pronounced but it may take some fiddling with the clusters to stop the illusion. However, since you have a clearly defined bush right next to that grass, that issue should be pretty much non-existent except in the case where this were an isolated grass tile and the player has never seen what a bush looks like in your game.

Finally, the only other real issue I'm seeing is the chicken is a bit too "top-down" and 'blocky' and resembles more of a rock than a character sprite. You should add more white in to his upper-body and the top of the chicken's head to bring it forward toward the screen a little. At the moment, the chicken's head looks like it is lower than the middle of its back due to the attention being focused on its back via the white (which is what's helping it to look more like a rock).

[Ambivorous]

Hi Astral! Thanks a lot for the advice.

Old/new:


Is this what you had in mind?
Lightened up the rocks, shrubs and posts. Increased the light of the chicken and changed his colours to bluish rather than yellowish (he was using the rock's colours, now unique). Shrubs could even use more lightening actually.
Little palette swappy thing on the short grass; to make flowers and other variations later.

Still undecided on long grass outlines. I did mess with the colours a bit to try make it look less round, but I think I actually just made it really noisy now. Damnit. Think I'll revert it for now and possibly redraw the grass from scratch with a different approach.

I will work on a more screen facing chicken (less top down) which is actually how Harvest Moon has done it, so I'm surprised I didn't initially do that.


TO DO(?):
Lighten shrubs more.
Short grass variation.
Revert long grass, but also make a new tile from scratch.
Side view chickens.
Make more things to put in the scene.

[astraldata]

That's somewhat what I had in mind -- except for the grass and the outlines on the top of the rock. The blue is almost indistinguishable on the rock's outline and should be a bit lighter to provide some contrast on your ramp. It would help it blend better into the world (especially with the old grass).

And the problem with the bush is that the darkest shadow color is darker than the shadow colors on everything else -- you should keep the darkest shadows for all of your colors/outlines/deepshadows around the same contrast in order to keep the visual style consistent across the image.