Sidecrollin' excessively tiled fun fest 2007-2008 *Updated 3/11*

[Doppleganger]

So my monitor was apparently calibrated very poorly for quite a good while but I managed to alleviate the problem as soon as I found out. But not before I created countless pieces of yellow tinged art. 

Anyways, I've been doing far too much NPA lately so I decided to pick up a small gig making some backgrounds. Ten/Seven 800x600 backgrounds seemed like too much of a task for me to do in my free time so after some finagling and bartering I got them down to 150x600. I figured that it'd be a great opportunity to sharpen my tiling skills since my image would tile indefinitely and appear 5 times on the screen at any given moment in time. As a tribute to my unfortunate monitor situation I decided to sprite this piece with some yellow and orange overtones.



Any c&c is appreciated as usual. It's a bit early but it's coming along nicely. Eventually there will be another image in the background and there will be some more stuff placed between the foreground and the path. It'll be chock full of parallax scrolling although I haven't yet decided how I'm going to break up the pieces.

[Faceless]

Generally the idea when tiling is to not have parts that stand out too much from the rest.
The V shaped branches at the bottom of this image are an example of something that does.
Honestly, I'd make another tile with some minor alterations to break things up a bit, and randomly intersperce it amongst the scene.

[Rosse]

It's well pixeled, but it lacks in contrast imho. One other thing is I think it's too flat (not just because there isn't enough contrast). It's because the foreground and the background has the same saturation and level of detail. I think you could give it more depth if you put more contrast and saturation in the foreground and lower the level of detail in the background.

[TomF]

Wow this is beautiful. Just add some variation, because at the moment they really stand out as tiles, which is the exact opposite of what you want. When done really well, it should be almost difficult to point the tiles out.

[Jad]

0: The thing with tiled stuff is that you usually don't want to make it look tiled if you can avoid it, right?

Well, right now there is only one tree with a trunk pointing straight up per tile, and it acts as a divider between each tile, thus making it seem very tiled.

I think more trees are needed, or you need to get rid of the vertical dividing lines.

[rezz]

This is beautiful, and very well done. However, I much prefer the 150x600 tile to the 800x600 tiled image.

Basically what you want to do is create at least one new 150x600 tile that, while varied, still allows the image as a whole to flow.

[piotrek255]

yeah, it needs more variety, add 1 or 2 trees, modify the current one if you dont have time, and tile them with the current one.
It should come up great. you have some awesome pixelling skills

[Faktablad]

In general, I think the branches are too large, there aren't enough of them, and there aren't enough leaves.  You have these huge trunk-like branches that stick out at random angles and have tiny tufts of leaves at the end.  Look at some real trees, and you'll see that there are leaves pretty much evenly spread out around the tree, and many branches.

[Doppleganger]

The biggest concern people seemed to have was with the rather unnatural and obviously tiling trees. I somehow missed that but it certainly stuck out once I read it. I remade the tree section completely and it seems that it's doing better now.

If I have the time I'll definitely take into account the idea of duplicating the tile and modifying it a bit. I have plans to alleviate the 'V's in the foreground but I'm not sure what they are yet. :

[Dusty]

The problem is, you're picking unique things that are obviously going to stand out when tiled. Because the way the tree bends in one direction stands out a lot because it's unique, rather than a tree that stands straight up. Same with the tree behind it that splits, it's just too unique and you can tell it's being tiled. The best way to fix the tiling issue is to draw each tree without any unique characteristics. But the newest update looks really nice.