Grass mockup

[NippeH]

Hey all. I'm working on this mockup but i'm kinda new too pixel art and already starting running into problems trying to get tiles to link together in the way I want them. I dont want my grass to dirt tiles to look linear. I've been using SoM3 for a reference kinda of allowed the reference viewing to take over the style in my flowers  and will most likely redo them. Just wondering if everything is looking nice and if anyone can give me a few tips for tile based stuff. Thanks for viewing!

[PypeBros]

imho your grass did a good job but may benefit of a few "larger bunch of grass" to deploy here and there in areas when you only see grass tiles (e.g. if you spot a 5x5 square only with grass, something has to be put there.

Your flowers reinforce the grid aspect instead of breaking it. Imho, this is because you made all your flowers on a NxN grid (or something alike) and made it cover as much as you could. Instead, give yourself a 2Nx2N grid and be more creative with the shape you give to the flower part.

HTH

[Mathias]

That's a well-done grass texture. Have you tried a slight hue shift on the highlights or shadows?

The flowers are nice but don't look great sparsely scattered (I know this is just a tiling test mockup but I have to crit what I see), I'd try making patches of them, create a small and large as well as colors variations of each flower for making patches. They also seem a little over saturated compared to the grass; stand out too much. You might even create variations of your grass tiles that has little flowers in them for special use, such as patches of plants.

As for the overall tiling issue of looking linear/linking together well, you've actually done really well. Warcraft II uses this tile system, it's a 16-tile system, I've studied it in depth and have created my own entire sets before. It can be a lot of fun but also frustrating. Breaking up the inherent linear look of the tiles depends much on how you lay them out.

You have a tiling error bottom left, in the bit of grass that pokes out into the dirt from the left side.

[CharlesGabriel]

The grass looks pretty good, although to be honest, it follows a lot of the SOM3 style, some people might even think this is an straight up rip... which is a good thing and a bad thing in my opinion. I suggest changing it slightly or something, so the difference is more obvious.
The last thing you want is non-spriters accusing you of it.

[Emtch]

Some of the grass tiles don't tile very well, there are lots of visible lines and weird patterns. That could be fixed quickly.

Also what is SOM3? There's only one Secret of Mana.

[Dr D]

Seiken Densetsu 3, which is also called Secret of Mana 2, because it IS a sequel to Secret of Mana, however it wasn't released in America.
It really is one of the most visually stunning games, of it's time at least.

[xhunterko]

Your grass texture is fairly good. However, like pypebros said, it does look like it's in a grid still. I think part of your problem comes from working in that strict tile size. I'd try and make it smaller. Lemme try and not get cryptic here. You can make a boundary of a 32x32 tile to work in. Then start your grass strands somewhere in the center, but try not to go over a 26x26 tile. I'll play with yours later to see if I can come up with anything.

On second thought. I think I'll show you some of my older tiles that I did for an adventure game I was going to do a while back. The main thing here is the lone grass tile. I'll rummage around some more and see if I can't scare up another screen shot.

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/rob/NeoKnights/cliffrpg.png

[Emtch]

Seiken Densetsu 3, which is also called Secret of Mana 2, because it IS a sequel to Secret of Mana, however it wasn't released in America.
It really is one of the most visually stunning games, of it's time at least.

No shit.
Secret of Mana is the sequel of Final Fantasy Adventure, so calling it "Secret of mana 2" is like calling the Star wars movies "The Empire Strikes Back 2, 3, 4 and 5".
Also, he said SOM3 not SD3 so it's even more wrong.

[CharlesGabriel]

Seiken Densetsu 3, which is also called Secret of Mana 2, because it IS a sequel to Secret of Mana, however it wasn't released in America.
It really is one of the most visually stunning games, of it's time at least.

No shit.
Secret of Mana is the sequel of Final Fantasy Adventure, so calling it "Secret of mana 2" is like calling the Star wars movies "The Empire Strikes Back 2, 3, 4 and 5".
Also, he said SOM3 not SD3 so it's even more wrong.

So what if it was a mistype, the importance is the message in the post... Well, don't worry man, I know about RPGs... I'm a developer, been doing this since 2001.

[xhunterko]

Erm, okaa-aay.

I realized that the tile that I show is not a smaller one. Here's another pic of said game. While it does kinda look like a grid, it gets lost a little when playing. Plus your eye tends to wander around a lot in it. I should probably let a more senior member try and help. But I'm trying to do my best here.

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/rob/NeoKnights/grassagain2.png

This is still early work and yours probably looks better as a result. However, it still needs to lose some grid, and look a bit more uniform. Right now it looks messy. But that doesn't help if it still looks like its trapped in a grid.

Hope I helped a little.