Creating tilesets - standardisation?

[Deidara]

I have a question about tilesets for environments. I'm trying my hand at a first videogame and plan to make levels with Tiled in the brush mode. I have tried making several tilesets that work for the most part, but it seems I am always missing some tiles or having some extra that are unnecessary. I looked for some sort of standardisation and also looked at how other games handle their edges and corners. Link's Awakening for example takes the path of making transparent corners and just slapping those on any environment, which is too apparent. Other games have all sorts of small extra corner tiles which wouldn't work too wel with Tiled.

Is there some sort of standard set that can be filled in with any sort of environment like the single tile, double tile, corners etc? For example as to what I'm having problems with, this is the tileset for water and land what would stick out of it. It is created by following what most other tilesets do. I notice that I am missing some ways to make bends and there is no tileset for a single hole.



And this is what I mean with problems when creating tilesets in Tiled, as you can see there is no way to leave a single block of space when trying to put down a tile at the marked  position, it autofills the tile below as ground even though a water tile would fit with no trouble.



Probably a very arbitrary question and I'm probably way overthinking this, but making tilesets seems to have very strict guidelines.

[dotodrymo]

This template may help you:

http://opengameart.org/content/seamless-tileset-template-ii

Because of the style of tileset you're making, this template has some superfluous tiles, but if you remove those, it should cover everything you need.

I googled as hard as I could, but there's a relevant tutorial which I failed to find. Does anyone know where to find that excellent guide about making efficient grass/dirt tilesets? It advises breaking a tileset into smaller chunks, as in, going from a 2x2 grid of 16x16 grass tiles to a 4x4 grid of 8x8 grass tiles. I think that the whole guide is a big image file on deviantart or something, which makes it tricky to google.

I'm not sure I'm correctly understanding your problem with Tiled. Did you modify an existing terrain? That could explain the weird water properties. You might have better luck using the tilesets tab instead of the terrains tab.

Edit:

I couldn't seem to replicate your problem. Is this what you were aiming for?

[Deidara]

This template may help you:

http://opengameart.org/content/seamless-tileset-template-ii

Because of the style of tileset you're making, this template has some superfluous tiles, but if you remove those, it should cover everything you need.

I googled as hard as I could, but there's a relevant tutorial which I failed to find. Does anyone know where to find that excellent guide about making efficient grass/dirt tilesets? It advises breaking a tileset into smaller chunks, as in, going from a 2x2 grid of 16x16 grass tiles to a 4x4 grid of 8x8 grass tiles. I think that the whole guide is a big image file on deviantart or something, which makes it tricky to google.

I'm not sure I'm correctly understanding your problem with Tiled. Did you modify an existing terrain? That could explain the weird water properties. You might have better luck using the tilesets tab instead of the terrains tab.

Edit:

I couldn't seem to replicate your problem. Is this what you were aiming for?

That's a great link, thank you very much! That is exactly the thing I was looking for.
Your solution of using the top-inner tile with separate edges on another layer is what I tried too initially, but that's kind of inelegant and looks off. My problem with Tiled could be fixed by filling the part I circled manually with the right tiles. What I wanted was getting another instance of the topleft island as an extended row like the one below the circled area. What I didn't think of was that the small island is larger than 1 tile so for Tiled it looks like I want to fill up the entire area. Could be fixed by drawing the row on a new layer but that means the left edge gets drawn over the existing ground tiles, making it look like the row is floating in the air. Guess there are some limitation and you shouldn't rely on the brush mode entirely.
 
Nevertheless, thanks again for that link, that will help me out a lot 

[dotodrymo]

Ah, yeah, that makes sense. I ran into similar problems when trying to make a cobblestone path texture. I ended up cheating my edge tiles so that I wouldn't need the little corner pieces, but the end result still has some severe limitations when it comes to making strips or holes. For a path texture, that's okay, but for your main landmass texture, going the extra mile and making a bunch of edge case tiles does seem like the more graceful solution.

I do recommend making sure your core texture is at final quality before you spend hours making exception tiles, though. If you're interested in C&C, get it now!