The Mana World Forums

I agree. There's a fine line between being inspired and copying and the general judgement here seems to be that you did not cross it.

Also great work.

Carry on.

Just a thought for the interior of the buildings, we could use a similar light poring in from the windows effect as that seen in this screenshot from Chrono trigger (only make it a little more subtle)

Len wrote:

Just a thought for the interior of the buildings, we could use a similar light poring in from the windows effect as that seen in this screenshot from Chrono trigger (only make it a little more subtle)

Maybe overlay? Afterall, this is atmosphere related (foggy).

Saphy wrote:Maybe overlay? Afterall, this is atmosphere related (foggy).

An overlay like the sandstorm or clouds wouldn't work too well here. It would be easier to put it on the over layer of the map.

A light effect like that would work better with tiles.

But if it is implemented in tile, a character could just walk and cover it even though the character is behind the light beam.

Which is why we put it above the player.

Well you could do it as a particle and also add dust specs.

Let's get back to the topic at hand.

From all the drafts that have been posted so far Lens looks by far the best, in my opinion. There are just 2 problems with it:
1. it is not 32x32 pixels tileable
2. it is a bit too dirty and ragged for an uptight aristocrat city.

When these two problems could be solved we would have our tileset.

Crush wrote:Let's get back to the topic at hand.

From all the drafts that have been posted so far Lens looks by far the best, in my opinion. There are just 2 problems with it:
1. it is not 32x32 pixels tileable
2. it is a bit too dirty and ragged for an uptight aristocrat city.

When these two problems could be solved we would have our tileset.

1. I don't consider this to be a major problem, its somewhat easy to break it down and make it workable..

(just an example)

2. A cleaner wood texture might fix this

That looks much more usable. I would have prefered it when you had scaled it down instead of up, though. Divisions of 64 pixels are about as wide as a player character is tall. Keeping the perspective correction in mind this would be about one and a half meter in reality. But when looking at real-life timber-framing houses you will notice that the divisions are usually much smaller than a meter.

Crush wrote:That looks much more usable. I would have prefered it when you had scaled it down instead of up, though. Divisions of 64 pixels are about as wide as a player character is tall. Keeping the perspective correction in mind this would be about one and a half meter in reality. But when looking at real-life timber-framing houses you will notice that the divisions are usually much smaller than a meter.

It really depends on the building, anyways I'm going to create alot of different divisions and wall tiles to help with the variety.!


Just a mock up for me to try out some ideas

Crush wrote:That looks much more usable. I would have prefered it when you had scaled it down instead of up, though. Divisions of 64 pixels are about as wide as a player character is tall. Keeping the perspective correction in mind this would be about one and a half meter in reality. But when looking at real-life timber-framing houses you will notice that the divisions are usually much smaller than a meter.

Just an FYI - not doing what Len is doing is a big mistake. His decision there is a good one. In fact, it's a feature you should embrace on a lot of your other tilesets.

Yes, you want to make a lot of tiles reuseable, but if you maniacally try and make every last tile reusable on 32-pixel devisions, "no matter what", it can easily become a mania that ends up making your tile art look stilted and awkward.

There will always be certain things that just need to be bigger than the game's basic tile size, and trying to ram them into this requirement is a bad idea. It's the relativism that does it - it's the fact that they are big (like, say, stone archways, or trees) that makes them what they are.

Jetryl beat me to post that, but just for emphasis:

Restricting the thinking to 32x32 is very band and dangerous.

Sorry for posting in a hurry without proper criticue and analysis, but it has mostly been covered in this thread before.

I like your mock-tileset Len. The question; should we use these houses within the trade city, or outside in the suburban area? We could use them in both areas if we really felt it necessary, but we should consider the coloring of any surrounding structures and the possibility that they might clash with the house graphics. Like the idea to use the cement wall tileset mixed with the above mentioned style of house.. ?



I could be wrong, but I don't think they go well together. So what is more important to the feeling of the trade city.. the cement wall, or those pretty houses? If we use the cement wall graphics, I think they need changes. (to start, bigger pieces of cement.. blocks instead of bricks) ..and if we need to match a wall to the houses, it could be something like a red-brown. Hell, the walls could be green if we really wanted them to be, but I'd like some input about the use of a wall surrounding the trade city and how that wall should look next to the buildings it surrounds.