@Ben2theEdge: thanks for the investigation! I'm actually not very much of a cheese eater at all, so these things are like some distant ritual to me. Looking at it now, the image in my head never really leant itself to the reality of cheese. I'm happy to shrug the concept off now as just `porous rocks' or something along those lines.
@EvilEye: the idea I had was actually to use darkness and lightness to define the sort of `game play tunnel' of the level. But when I pondered it more, the idea in my mind actually contrasts dark non-walkable foreground against a brighter background. Basically the orange parts of the platform you can walk on, and all the dark purply stuff you can jump through, so you can jump from a lower orange part up through purple onto a higher orange part above you, for example. So I kind of wanted the platforms to recede into the background, in that sense.
Also, the things I love about PM6 are:
- the tile map mode, as ptoing mentioned
- the fast sort operations you can perform on the palette, for instance I can sort by brightness, and then use the [ and ] bracket keys to jump up and down in brightness of my currently selected colour
- fast manipulation of the brush with shortcut keys, for instance I can select a circular brush and press Shift+H to double its size and H to halve its size
- the way you can set up ghost images of frames around the current frame you're editing in animation to see how the flow of the sprite is going through the animation
- the incredible variety of brush modes available, I'm especially interested in experimenting with Multishade, which lets you define ramps in the palette and then dodge/burn stuff where the colours go up or down in brightness exactly according to the ramps you've specified. Genius!
Check out the video tutorials they have, they basically go through a bunch of the features it has:
http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php?Documentation/Video+TutorialsI'm a complete novice with the program and probably can't even begin to praise it fully. But I can see myself becoming much faster with this program than with, say, GraphicsGale (which is what I've been using for ages). I personally can't use photoshop for pixelling, it feels all clunky and cumbersome and I just end up getting frustrated with it.
Anyway, update:
Basically just a quick sketch of the backdrop. I haven't really done very many backdrops before, and when I have I've generally found myself struggling a fair bit, so I think I'll try to keep this one pretty simple on detail. Concept is essentially `giant wondrous cavern'. Here's the backdrop isolated (1st), and a version I was thinking about where there are more columns in the distant plane (2nd):
http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/tcfi_backdrop_02.pnghttp://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/tcfi_backdrop_01.pngI'm thinking I prefer the second, but the first one has more of a subtle luminance to it. I don't know...
Thanks for the comments!
EDIT: Orrr something like this: