Johnny J

[Decroded]

an important consideration here is what is the game's res?
i think this decides the general minimum scale of ur tiles and how frequently they repeat.

from here i think u can fill some game space with repeated tiles then come back and make a bunch of variations and larger sections to break up the repetitive effect.
keep in mind that structure and controlled repetition brings congruity to ur scene, just like recycling colours can bring harmony.

[wzl]

No clue about resolution yet. I'll decide when i get around making the prototype. I'm thinking 3x or 4x zoom in fullscreen and consequently less in windowed.
Collision tile size is 8x8, but i think using 16x16 for graphic tiles is reasonable.

Good point about the congruity. especially for interactible terrain like the climbing parts it makes sense.

[Ai]

Hey, this is looking a lot more readable, good job. I liked the palette swap with the lava in it -- the hue contrasts make it pop a lot more.

IMO resolution isn't so important itself rather than : where is the character shown, how large is he proportional to the screen? Which I realize is related but IMO it simplifies the problem.

According to your tilemap editor you don't necessarily have to use 'collision tiles' if you don't want to, for example Tiled supports polygons and polylines, whose vertices automatically snap to tile boundaries by default. This is a lot faster and less fiddly to make than tile-based collision, but does mean you would have to draw the collision shapes for everything rather than being able to autogenerate collision info from your graphical tiles.

I agree with Kazuya that bevelling can be neat but isn't actually necessary. Clean flat planes for rocks are often much more readable, when possible.

Your latest tiles seem halfway between decroded's edit and your previous style, which is probably a comfortable medium -- it reminds me of Megaman X now. Though I must agree with Helm that once you get a systematic rendering method going, complexity on the level of decroded's edits are not hard. Looking into Voronoi systems might help -- they are a good approximation of rock plane structure,  and relatively easy to make up from imagination. Aside from just being fascinating

Anyway whatever you do with the style, I suggest tightening up the shapes you are using, making them more minimalistic and focused, it helps make the overall form pull together IMO. That's the most noticable difference to me right now between Decroded's edit and your new tiles -- his rocks are simple shapes whereas yours feel like they are trying to be more photorealistic / sketchy.

[rikfuzz]

This is really looking something special, keep it up!

So you're pixeling the whole set, without breaking down to re-usable tiles?

[wzl]

true, collision tiles are not necessarily required, but they make things easier in some cases. Fall-through platforms, climbin areas. i'd rather use the tile approach for this. It's more reliable and easier to implement anyways x)

Yeah, i still love the density in decroded's edit. i'll see what i can learn from it.

rikfuzz:
I was initially planning on making just very basic tiles and overpaint them. Now i'm not so sure. Creating this level of detail manually in every place seems like overkill. I want to get this game done eventually

Idea now is that i'll create a bunch of template tiles, tiling ones, but not the necessary transitions, so i can save some work there not trying to make edges, and manually overpaint seams etc.
From what i can tell the seams and edges are one of the most recognizable parts in image tiling too.

[Decroded]

maybe just use the darkness to ur advantage in that u can just have it all dark blue then imply rocks here and there rather than making such a large painting.
and I guess remember the brain notices the one thing that stands out more than the many similar things, which means u only need to scatter the odd different thing around the place (at minimum) to make it feel varied to the player.

[wzl]

maybe just use the darkness to ur advantage in that u can just have it all dark blue then imply rocks here and there rather than making such a large painting.

Not sure i get what you mean here.




Tried today to get more familiar with the techniques decroded used. Was experimenting with some climbable tiles on the far right. The one that ended up in the wall i think are actually quite recognizable as climbable. I used the top bits as base from his edit to get a feel for the shapes.

I created a ramp for the lava parts as well, and reshaped the formations to not have see-through lava bits in it. That felt quite strange before.

I did the something similar to the waterline so it works now in perspective. Though, as a result the walkpaths don't appear to be on top of eachother, so thats an issue. But the cross-section view on it really felt quite strange. Although

And then, suddenly, some kraken monster appeared in the wall. Dunno where it came from. it was just suddenly there.




Playing around with some different floor to back-wall transitions. Gonna go for some floor to below-wall/frontwall? whatever it is, the beneath part tomorrow and then soon start working on a basic tileset and get some actual gamedev going.

[Decroded]

dude u seem to picked this up alot faster than i did 

that last screenshot has some really great textures growing on it well done
one thing to keep in mind that i still struggle with is that if u fill the whole screen with this detailed texture it really takes away from the effect.
that is what i meant by using the darkness to ur advantage in that u can have large sections of plain totally dark shadow areas and then just have bits and pieces popping out into the light here and there.
ur already doing it in that last screenshot and i think u can take it further with more interesting placement.
its something that is hard to see when ur face is right up in the pixels so take a step back and have another look, and keep another zoomed out view (eg 2:1) when ur working to keep things in perspective.
then mark out sections where it is filled with shadow and mark out some other areas where patches of rock will show.
doing this adds a "structural" feeling to things in that there are the large chunks of rock which are then broken into the smaller detailed bits ur drawing now.

u can have large sections of darkness with sparse lit areas where there is lava.
so once u imply some larger sections of implied structure u can upscale the cracks in the rock u have now and make them have lava flows and leaks that are a bit more epic and flow over the surface of the rocks instead of down a flat walls.
and keep in mind u can have some rocks around the edges of these flows which are lit from both sides by the primary (grey-green) light and the lava.


i think the kraken thing looks great u should develop it further perhaps with different colours.
im imagining it as a LARGE obstacle u need to stop and figure out how to get around/past it.
so u could have some rock structure which forms a large shadowy crevice, and we see just its eyes in the darkness with a few tentacles hanging out.
and if u go near it, the tentacles pull u into the darkness and its game over son.
IMO that would be scarier and look more interesting/professional than seeing it just sitting there.
the scale of it i believe should be relative to ur screen res but u could just rough something in until u cement that in (its hard to choose isn't it!).

i also really like that rock bridge u started on the left i'd like to see where thats going.
if u wanted to u could make it a one-way street as it collapses when u run across it.

regarding the background if u like the look of it u should separate it in 2 layers.
i think the back-most layer could be made into a large tile which repeats vertically and horizontally.
the closer layer u could do the same or u could break it down into a 32x32 tileset or something which would allow u to make larger pieces to brick together.

anyway i could rant all day so... 

[wzl]

Thanks man

Yeah, i felt the larger dark spaces feel more natural and less busy, also reduces the amount of detail necessary, so its a win-win

I definitely need to play around with water and lava some more. palette cycling is just too tasty to leave out. But i will leave that until i have it implemented in the game, otherwise testing would be too tedious.

Heh, the kraken really just happened. A happy mistake so to speak. But now that you mention it, it could work quite well ingame actually. It would sort of fit into the cthulhu mythos, and kraken are generally terrifying creatures x)

Having the bridge collapse is another nice thought. Definitely goes onto the list!

Mhh having the background layers tiling is not a bad idea. I haven't put much thought into it yet. I definitely want to have it parallaxing at some point. Need some consideration on that topic.

anyway i could rant all day so... 

Don't let me stop you, i welcome any feedback and suggestions

I'll be firing up the stream and work some more on it. Feel free to join


worked on some floors today. got 3 different styles now. some roughly textured floor. one made of boulders, and one with  bigger rocks (top row)

i tried, just out of curiousity, to tile them randomly, and surprisingly enough, without any edits, it works. mostly (left side below top row). Some unfavorable seams but oh well. thats something to work with 

Amazing how forgiving this artstyle is.

Current thinking is to have the floors with according bottom walls as interconnecting tilepieces, and the actual backwalls independent from that. It seems to workout quite nicely so far.

Going with an attempt like this i can tile and combine different parts of fore and background to create different variations all over the place



This was a good art day

[Decroded]

seeing some inconsistency now in the way the rocks are formed


its probably fine to mix directions as long as i guess ur aware of it and control it maybe?

also new tiles are rendered a bit like rice bubbles (http://www.syrupandtang.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/bubbles.jpg).
maybe thats fine where it matches surroundings but here it looks too different to the other formations IMO.