Trade city

All development of pixel art, maps and other graphics.


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Crush
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Trade city

Post by Crush »

This topic is for collecting concepts and graphics for the new trade city which is the next step in the development of the Argaes continent.

The idea so far is to use tiles from Irucards concerete wall tileset for the city walls and ground tiles:
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And combine them with Tudor-era style timber framing houses. I started with a "proto tileset" with the general shapes without detailed textures yet:
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I did some detail experiments at the walls of the right half of the upper left building but these don't really work out.

My idea is to give the framing a similar texture like Irucard uses to use for wood. Regarding the walls... I think a slight noise pattern should do the job.
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Falcata
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Post by Falcata »

Nice job on the Doric-style pillars. Are you going to add Ionic or Corinthian pillars? What about Tuscan or Composite pillars?
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Post by Crush »

Ignore the pillars - they don't fit into the trade city concept.
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Bjørn
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Post by Bjørn »

Crush wrote:Ignore the pillars - they don't fit into the trade city concept.
Couldn't they be used for the town hall, or something?
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Post by aaaantoine »

I'm a pretty good artist, and I know a thing or two about sprite construction. Are there any special guidelines I should follow if I manipulate your image?
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Post by Crush »

You can find our tileset design guidelines on the wiki: http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/ ... evelopment
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Post by aaaantoine »

Here's what I have so far. I've had sporadic opportunities to work on it.

Image
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Crush
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Post by Crush »

Looks really great so far. Keep up the good work.
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Post by Yuuki »

hey thats really great! =D

but i think it would be cool if the houses was something more like it:

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i made a picture with the changes that i like because i'm no good with words =p :wink:
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Post by AxlTrozz »

Here an additional option to your consideration, bottom left
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edit: added top left
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Post by Crush »

Regarding the design by Yuuki:

There are practical reasons for using 16 pixel divisions instead of 32 pixels.

It has a lot of advantages for the mapper when a wooden board is used as a tile divider because it allows to apply a decoration to the white part with one tile. But when using a 32 pixel division and putting the board on the tile edge you would need an end tile that is just a few pixel wide which is very unpractical. I made this mistake with the woodland village tileset and I don't want to repeat it.

When using a 16 pixel division on the other hand you can have a board as a divider between two tiles and still have an edge tile that uses more than half of the tile.


Regarding the design by AxlTrozz:

A very interesting design. But it is not the right stuff for the trade city IMO. Nevertheless something we should keep and use somewhere else.
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Post by Jetryl »

Crush wrote:Regarding the design by Yuuki:

There are practical reasons for using 16 pixel divisions instead of 32 pixels.

It has a lot of advantages for the mapper when a wooden board is used as a tile divider because it allows to apply a decoration to the white part with one tile. But when using a 32 pixel division and putting the board on the tile edge you would need an end tile that is just a few pixel wide which is very unpractical. I made this mistake with the woodland village tileset and I don't want to repeat it.

When using a 16 pixel division on the other hand you can have a board as a divider between two tiles and still have an edge tile that uses more than half of the tile.
:| There are a good deal of time savings in mapping to be wrought from your suggestions, though I'd note a few things:

1] The building heights that yuuki used are much more appropriate relative to the pc/npc size.


2] (the real reason I'm making this post) There's a major, major misconception that a lot of people get, going into pixel art, and that is the misconception that whatever their tile size is should act as the "unit size" for everything in the game. That is to say, they feel compelled to make most objects a full tile wide, without leaving blank space between it. They also are afraid of having sections of tile art that can't be broken apart into single tiles - they're afraid of having large, say, 64x64 chunks that can only be used together as a 64x64 chunk.

The danger that comes from this is that it makes one's tile art look very stilted and artificial. I would strongly suggest taking a different tack at things; at drawing more organic shapes while ignoring any of the constraints of having to chop them up as tile art, and then after they are drawn and look good, modifying them to be more modular and reuseable. In my experience, it has really helped to make my tile art look a lot more natural.


3] One thing that would improve all the tile art in your game, and give it more of that "classic SNES/Squaresoft feel" would be to use a full gamut of luminosity values in all color regions in your art. Color regions would be different materials, such as the white stucco areas of the above houses, or the stone foundations, or the brown roofs. And what I'm suggesting is that you have a range of different brightnesses of each areas color, in each area, that go all the way from nearly white, to nearly black.

One might think that this would make everything equally bright, but it doesn't - the trick is to make the distribution of the different brightnesses different for each region. That is, the darker parts like the roof would most be the dark parts of their color set, using their highlight colors very sparingly, only on the tips of roof shingles. Whereas the stucco walls would use their color set's dark colors very sparingly.
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Post by Len »

I agree with Jetryl

I don't understand why you champion that overly simplified look. its a textureless colorless nightmare and looks nothing like Seiken Densetsu 2 or 3 (however it looks like 1 which is a colorless gameboy game).

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(screenshot from Seiken Densetsu 3 Aka secrets of mana 2)

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(my attempt based on the screenshot and other reference images)

I realize it looks to much like the SD screenshot and would need to be reworked a little before it could be used for TMW... still Lise is cute :oops:
Last edited by Len on 02 Jan 2008, 18:10, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Falcata »

Actually, I would say the tiles don't need reworking. While they are similar to those in the screenshot, they don't look like duplicates.
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Jetryl
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Post by Jetryl »

Falcata wrote:Actually, I would say the tiles don't need reworking. While they are similar to those in the screenshot, they don't look like duplicates.
Likewise.
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