New Tiles Screenshots

In this screenshot, you can see my new rocky tiles and how they gradually dissipated into a simpler tile further down. While I’m much happier with the continuity of the pattern compared to before, the transition between the two types of tiles is still much too harsh at this points and should be a much smoother gradient. Being a natural pattern, there shouldn’t be such straight lines and obvious pattern repetition! As a result of my last post, the guys from MiniBoss (who have made Out There Somewhere) have confirmed with me that they infact use a slightly altered tile which is placed infrequently throughout the pattern to avoid overuse of the same tiles.

Here you can see how the same tiles can be applied to things like these floating platforms, although at the moment the edges need some serious refining to better match my original level design plans. The wooden platform has been added for a little variety in platform surface, and in this case I think merges quite well with the rest of the scenery. I’ve used a slightly rocky edge around the platform to make it look like it has been built into the mountain.

This screenshot shows an example of a house made from my new set of building tiles, and how this fits into a similar environment. The wood of the house seems a lot darker than the tiles from the previous building, so I’m considering making these a little lighter. This is relieved slightly by the lighting , which highlights parts of the building and dims out some of the background, so for now it’s probably fine. I’m still using the same light effect for all lights, so I will change the hanging lights soon to vary slightly from the light of the lanterns.
You can also see the blue-tile pattern I made in this screenshot, although it doesn’t blend in nicely like the brick tile did. Feedback I got from this screenshot was that it looked like an explorable area with a blue-tiled background, so I could use it this way in the future.

Loads of things to do this week! Next week’s target is to create a prototype ready enough for testing by other people, so this week is pretty much a preparatory phase to get as much in as possible before hand.

This morning, I applied some of the new tiles I’d made to the game in Game Maker. I created the ground by laying out a random assortment of the rocky/mountainy tiles, and this is how it looked…

My first observation of this technique is firstly that the tile repetition makes the whole scene look horribly boring, and secondly that the square tiles inevitably make the scene look very angular. I noticed that the repetition is not so obvious in places where there is a lot going on. When there is a lot of space and the occasional rock jutting out, the repetition of small details are a lot more emphasised. So my first objective is to limit the amount of plain tiles used throughout the pattern.

For a little insight into how other developers are tackling the problem, I went to the DevLog section of the TIGsource forums and clicked on the first link for a random example. I’m worried that if I keep going back to the same sources, my game will appear to be a mimicry of another game…
By pure coincidence, I landed on a pixel-art style game that uses a similar rocky tileset! The game is called Out There Somewhere, and has recently been finished.

Out There Somewhere

Here, there is only one rocky tile which is regularly repeated throughout. There is a slight variation in some of the edge tiles etc, but the pattern mainly consists of one tile. Towards the bottom of the image, after the tile has been repeated 3 or 4 times, the pattern gradually breaks apart and becomes a simpler pattern, but in an organised way unlike the random pattern I had tried to create. This really helps relieve what could potentially be an over-complicated, messy design, and somehow doesn’t look “blocky”, despite this game also using square tiles.

Out There Somwhere

To resolve my problem, firstly I felt that the rocky tiles should fit together more seamlessly in the first place. I’ve seen a technique used for create seamless surface textures for 3D models which I though would also be appropriate in this situation- I split the rocky tile into 4 and offset the design so I could work on the joining parts in the middle. The result is this, which has been changed very little, but looks a lot more seamless than before:

After feeling happy with this, I went on to create the “middle” tile to connect the rocky tile to the simple, block colour tile. I created one of these tiles for each side of the tile, so it can be used anywhere in the design. I thought about using a lighter colour for this, but preferred the darker colour as it attracts less attention!

I tweaked the slanted tiles slightly, although they didn’t need changing much to fit in with the altered tile design.

There are still a few tiles I need to make to completely eliminate the unnatural-looking square edges, most of these are edge tiles to avoid too many straight lines. I’m also going to create some edge tiles for grass and some random patches of grass growth to dot throughout large areas of the same pattern.

Also, looking back at my learning agreement I’ve noticed that I mentioned that some sound should be in place by now, which is something I haven’t really considered yet… Like the graphics, I’m OK with using placeholder sounds as this point, as I mainly want to ensure that I get good, working sound throughout this project.