Constructive criticism please?
I tried making some tilesets for a "game" I started writing (currently only consists of walking around). There's dirt, mudstone (which is what I've decided to call the generic gray stone), and peridotite (the green one). I mostly want to know how worried I should be about making the big blobs of the same type look better. They currently have 4 different variations of each sprite to try to avoid a visible grid, and have separate sprites for bordering air. The border tiles (the dirt ones are visible) are perhaps a tad bit rectangular, but I do want them to have corners where normal tiles would so that I don't have to make my collision detection fancier or have the player floating on air. Also I might want to eventually add dirt borders similar to the borders with air, for, say, two different types of rocks meeting. Please ignore the box pretending to be a player :).
Oops, I almost forgot the sandstone and red sandstone. Sedimentary rocks are hard. These were made by overlaying horizontal shadowy lines on HSV noise, but I'm not entirely happy with how they turned out. If anyone has ideas for a better way of doing it, I'm all ears.
They look kinda like what they are, noisy noise.
Do you have a sense of what kind of art style you want for the whole project?
There are probably dozens of grass and dirt tilesets on OGA that you could probably use for these.
If you're intent on creating the tiles yourself, I'd advise you simplify dramatically. Choose a three color spread for each material, that is a dark, mid tone and bright color. Fill the tile with the mid tone and then just sprinkle in a few dots of dark and bright. You'll still essentially have noise but it'll be alot less busy, especially when repeated all across the screen.
I'll add that even a few pixels worth of rounding will help the 'rectangular' look dramatically and should be slight enough that player's will forgive it with regards to collisions.
Just my two cents, hope it helps!
ju
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Ok, I'll try that after I finish my homework. I'm not really sure yet what my style is, but here's a giant bunny that will probably also exist. Thanks!
Edit: And I could probably get dirt and stone from OGA, but I want to be able to add types of tiles that I can't find here, so I will need to know how to make them.
I redid the dirt and modified the stone so they have less colors and less contrast (adding the bunny made me realize that so much contrast was distracting). I also rounded the corners a little bit. I tried rounding them more, but I can only round the corners that stick out and not the corners that stick in, so it looked wierd. To make the peridotite, I just used the stone but with different colors, which doesn't look great. I'm aiming to get something that resembles http://www.pitt.edu/~cejones/GeoImages/1Minerals/1IgneousMineralz/Olivine/Peridotite.jpg. Thanks!
Still looks very noisy, and more like grass with the odd blue flower.
You really need to increase the scale a great deal, even if that means doing so unrealisticly. Need to be able to see the individual crystals it it's going to be identifiable.
Also the colour is quite off from the sample image. Yours is very distinctly green whereas the sample is yellow and dark grey with only a hint of green to it.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
Sorry I took awhile. I very suddenly didn't have much free time. Since I figured it was relevent, I added darkness. Also I redid all the tiles. I think I want to keep dirt pretty simple. While trying to make peridotite, I used a peice of http://opengameart.org/content/alien-planet-platformer-tileset, layered it, edited it until it looked good and tileable, and then decided it looked more like stone so I just made it gray. To make the peridotite, I did the same thing but with the green crystal from here: http://opengameart.org/content/opp-jungle-tiles. I'm pretty happy with the stone and dirt, but not sure how I feel about the peridotite. I don't want to make it too crystally, though, because I also want to make olivine, which should probably actually look like crstals. Also, sadly, I realized that doing graphics takes time and I should probably spend more of my time on the coding, but I'll still work on the graphics if I get stuck on a bug or something.
Thanks for all your help!
You can't dig 50 feet down and hit nothing but grass; it should only be on the outside. You don't have to do it like Terraria, where it's something that grows on various blocks, but you should at least put the grass blocks on the edges, where it's exposed. Also, pick a background image, even if it's a placeholder. It'll change how you feel about the contrast between sky and blocks a bit, and you want to try a few out early to decide what you want.
The green stuff isn't supposed to be grass, it's supposed to be rock with a high olivine content that is only found in large quantities really deep underground. For now I'm having the map generate it near the surface because I haven't yet added digging but I wanted to be able to see it. Thanks for reminding me about grass, though. I was just thinking about how to make the map take up less space in memory, and I completely forgot it needs to have information about grass. (I actually am planning on doing grass kind of like Terraria.)
I do plan to add a background eventually, but it'll probably be a while. Also I might make the sky near the bottom of the screen a bit paler than at the top, but I should probably focus more on making it actually be a game first.
This looks great man. Good luck.
are these tiles being generated or are you placing them yourself in a tile editor?
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They're being generated. The source is here: https://github.com/sekelsta/burrowbun It's currently a good portion of a terraria-style game engine, but it's on hold indefinitely while I use my free time modding Minecraft horses.
Edit: Looking back at this very old thread, I can't believe I ever thought that first set was good. Thanks again to everyone who gave input.
I guess you progressed. :)
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