[WIP] House interior, door problem

[startselect]

Hi, I'm trying to make a tileset for a fantasy house interior. I'm having problems with the openings in the north-south interior walls. I opted for having openings instead of doors (like the east-west interior walls) to make them more readable and also added rugs that are places where the floor of the opening is. But I still don't think it signals the player enough about where to walk to enter the opening or even that there is an opening.

All ideas on how to improve the readability is very much appreciated! Ty!

[eishiya]

Many games cheat and make the openings artificially wide so that you can see the floor in the doorway instead of bothering with getting the size of the door correct. Some don't even bother with the concept of side-wall height and just have the doors be a simple break in the top of the wall, no indication of wall height. Many other games just don't bother with east/west doors at all, and instead just have north/south doors linked up by wide east/west hallways (e.g. Sword of Mana's Vinquette Hall), and it's a convention most players don't mind by now.

If you don't want to do "cheat" like that, consider having lighter wood in the doorway, lighter at the bottom (where the floor reflects light most strongly at it) and darker towards the top, and perhaps some special tiles to draw attention to that area by giving it a more interesting shape (door frame, hinges, decoration, etc).

In general, you should rely mainly on things like silhouette, floor patterns*, open doors, other decoration, and light shining through the doorway to show the door is here. You might even benefit from not having the top of the door indicated with the break in the wall, since it's a distracting visual element that doesn't correspond to the walkable part of the door.
* By having floor patterns that cross the doorway (lengthy carpets joining rooms, continuous floor texture instead of borders like at other walls, etc), you can subconsciously hint that the rooms are linked in that area, so the player doens't even "see" the wall between them.

An unrelated thing: Your walls feel very flat because the wood is perfectly aligned with the stone and plaster/daub, looking more like a wallpaper with those things drawn on rather than actual structure. Letting them stick out would help with that. You don't have to break tile boundaries, you could have a couple of pixels of wood/dirt/dark-dust at the bottom of the stone or something like that.

Here's a fairly minor edit:

I gave the walls a bit more volume by raising the stones a couple of pixels, and added sticky-outy bits at the bottoms of each pillar. Those same sticky-outy bits are visible around doors. I made the rugs less brown (so they don't blend visually with the walls; they don't have to be lighter, I just used the available non-brown colours)  and extended them so that they look more like rugs laid between rooms, rather than just something attached to walls. In the back room, I also "opened" the door. I got rid of the tops of the doors, since they weren't conveying useful information imho, and were just "lying" about where the door is.
This is still not as clear as the north/south doors, but I think it reads better than before, at least to me.

Something missing from my edit is a distinctive visual element for the doors. For example, what if all the doors had little awnings, or some sort of supports, or other bits that stick out and look similar in both front and side view? Those would help a lot.

[0xDB]

Instead of leaving the cutoff empty, a simplified dark top view of the beams around the door could be drawn and a few pixels fading out on the sides to hint at the direction of the adjacent beams:

[startselect]

Wow thanks for the great replies! The wall volume edit is great!
Both of you saw the top of the left-right doors but what I was trying to do was the show the edge of the wall visible through the opening, there isn't supposed to be left-right doors at all, just openings. And nobody seeing that just hammers home the point about my terrible readability
The stick-out bits next to the openings are still viable though, and the rug edit is great! When I decide on a floor I can change the rugs to blend more with the floor so it feels more continuous like your rug edit eishiya.
I wouldn't mind cheating with the width of the opening but sometimes (like in this example) there isn't really room below the door for that before the end of the wall. But maybe the light bottom and dark top transition will help with that.

Will update when I have time to do an edit, most likely monday. Just wanted to say thank you for the great reply right away!

[eishiya]

If they're just meant to be openings and not doors, then going wider is definitely a possibility in at least some areas. In this example, the top opening could simply not have the front bit of wall:


Here's a question: Since you're so concerned with the heights of the walls being represented accurately, what are you doing regarding characters walking behind walls and being hidden? Can characters actually do that, or are the lower few tiles of each wall non-walkable? If the latter is the case, then you'll have to rethink how you do the east/west openings, since where the opening is won't actually be walkable, and wider openings with a bit of floor visible are likely to be your only viable option.

[startselect]

I was thinking about making the inner walls below the player either very transparent or removed entirely. Now that you mention it maybe that should extend along the vertical walls up to each opening too. That way the opening will be very apparent at least when the player is in the same room.

[startselect]

Finally had an hour to try to incorporate some of the edits and test out the inner wall fades. Also started on a wood floor tile but it's quite strong still, I will try to make it softer without looking washed out.
First the new edit with the player standing below the inner horizontal wall.

Then here are two possible versions of the player standing above the inner horizontal wall, one with 25% alpha and one where it is completely removed.

What do you guys think? Any more pointers? The last ones where super helpful!

[eishiya]

I'm not a fan of fading/disappearing walls myself, but if you have to have them, then I say go with the fading walls, perhaps at a slightly higher opacity than you currently have. Lower contrast in the floor should help the faded wall look better, too. Right now it's clashing too much with the floor texture, a subtler texture would avoid that clash.

[startselect]

I lowered the contrast of the floor and now I'm quite pleased with it. I also furnished the house to see how that would look and now I hate both the invisible/transparent version. Should I just shift the top rooms up 48px to avoid hiding stuff behind the horizontal inner walls?

[eishiya]

Do you plan to actually use the ability to "hide" stuff behind walls? If not, then sure, just make that area unwalkable.
Also, you might not need to make the full 48 pixels unwalkable, you only need to make enough unwalkable that the player can see enough their character when they're behind the wall to clearly know where they are. That may only need to be 32 pixels or less depending on the height/scale of the character.

You should make the top of the walls more distinctive as well, maybe give them some little stubs?

Here's an edit with some stubs, and also a gradient up the side of the opening just to make it stand out even better from the top of the wall. The gradient isn't necessary when the floor is visible (like in the bottom room), but I think it helps with the openings where the floor isn't visible, like at the top.


On a semi-related note, the environment sprites look good, but they're very noisy! I think reducing the contrast a tad, especially on the shelf contents, would help a lot. Adding some shadows below the tables and chairs would also look nice. Some games achieve such shadows by having translucent shadows on the sprites, others use dark floor tiles to approximate shadows.