Game & Map Screenshots 10

Actually, the lighting is really bad. I highly recommend pushing the opacity up a bunch so that it's not drowning out the details of the map. I can barely make out the paths (which look weirdly flat as is) and it makes the trees and houses appear unstuck from the landscape for some reason (might be the light at the bottom of them). Also, try adding some long grass around, some flowers and whatnot. The ground looks bare and bland and there's a lot of empty space just thrown around.

---

Sorry, but I have to agree with @Ksi , your lighting washes out the entire image and makes it really hard to make out what you are looking at. Its completely removed any sort of contrast from the image leaving it looking flat and blurry. Lighting only needs to be subtle but I see a lot of devs going absolutely nuts with transparent lighting in MV and it almost always looks bad (with it being as common as it is, especially on these forums I dont blame you for doing the same), it takes a lot of experience and understanding to make it look genuinely good. Theres more to lighting than just slapping a harsh gradient with some transparency on it over your game.

@Kvothe If you are going to put in shadows, then you need to be consistent. You have put in a significant shadow for the house and the main tree. Even the top lamp post gets one However, your cliff throws no shadow at all. This, I think, is a big contributor to how flat things feel. That cliff, and the tree on it, would be shading the house.

I agree that the light is too strong, it is drowning out the map itself. I'm not too keen on the actual hue chosen, but that may be partly an effect of the strength.

The colour and brightness of the plants around the base of the main tree clashes with the rest of the grass, and adds to the disconnected feel between the ground and the objects on it.

Bathroom inside a freaky nightclub. Any thoughts on the floor tile?

@Lorenze I find it a bit 'busy'. It's okay on the empty main part, but in the top section where there are other objects it starts to look somewhat messy, and my eyes have to focus clearly on the separate elements to be sure I've seen what's really there.

Been taking a break from any heavy time-invested game development - until I get some personal issues in order. But while working on some other stuff, I've been making tilesets. So um, here's a mock up of a theater area I guess.

Been looking at Gameboy tilesets - so I am trying to get a feel from them (just with more color, detail), mostly Link's Awakening so I'm trying to get a feel for that.

@sleepy_sealion You should bring out the stairs. Right now it's really hard to tell that they're supposed to be stairs and they just look like a strange wall decoration. Remember that stairs take up floor space, a lot of it. It's easy to forget to think about stuff in three dimensions when you're mapping, even professional games have troubles with it at times, but you need to if you want it to have the proper depth.

If you'd like critique on the tiles themselves, we've got a lovely Resource WIP thread in the Resource Support section that you can post in.

This is a little test map for a game project I am making for my 6 year old nephew based on a pitch he gave me. This map was really to try to get a feel for the visual style, what do you guys think? I want to try to keep it simple and clean while maintaining the low resolution artwork of my main game Shooty and the Catfish while avoiding the Gameboy limitations associated with it.

Cute! That layout looks like a puzzle game. It's not clear what that map is for or what you're supposed to be doing, so it's hard to give the mapping a critique. Since almost all the visuals are lineless and chunky the water feels out of place. I think if you just thickened the light blue of the wave a bit more, even better thickened inconsistently, it would match the rest a lot better.

As you guys already readed in the title, i made my first map these days, and i really want to know ways to improve it.
Thx, really apreciate the help! :)

@Milksteeve

I've merged your thread with our Game & Map screenshots thread.

@Milksteeve
The layout of the map is nice, and for a first map a very good attempt, but you need to aim for consistency. Here you are aiming to show a heavily snowed up area. But:
Although some of your trees have branches with snow on them, others do not, e.g. compare the small tree/bush on the left (no snow) with the one towards the bottom centre. Also the 3 larger bare trees have no snow at all, yet their bigger branches should have collected more, not less.
The wooden awnings (not sure what to call them) over the two windows have no snow, and as the roof clearly has no overhang to protect them, they should. You will need to edit the tiles to add some.

On a different note, you have used the crack tile normally used for cliffs etc. on a wooden wall. In my opinion it doesn't work because wood does not split like that.
As your roof has no overhang (default roofs don't, so nothing unusual there) there is nothing for that rope to hang from. It therefore looks like it's been glued on.
Unless that simply enormous tree stump has story significance, I'd remove it, as it is massively out of scale with everything else. If you do keep it, you need to add more snow to the top surface so that it is as covered as the smaller tree stumps.

Finally, the door. At first I thought that the door event had been displaced because it seemed to be lower than the wall of the house. It was only when I peered at it for a long time that I realised that it wasn't. You need to add snow to the door frame at least, to the same height as you have on the walls, for it to look part of the building. If you can add it to the door itself, so much the better.

But to repeat, for a first map this is very nicely done.

Thanks for the feedback! This was actually a quick test map I put together just to test out the tiles I have been working on, but your right about the water, now I can see how odd it looks having a single pixel line to represent it as well. That was valuable feedback, I think I am going to make the tree shadows green instead of grey as well to help them look a little more natural.

Thank you very much, srsly, that helps a lot.
I'll be doing those alterations right now

just fixing some assets

@Milksteeve

I love the latest one! I think it looks tidier, neater and clearer and the pathways make more sense in this one to me. Also the trees fit perfectly with the snow. Good job!

What about now?

thank you very much! :3

Hey.

I'm pretty new to RPG Maker and made my first town today and I'm looking for some feedback what I can do better.

[embedded media]

I don't really know if I like it or not, since it does look very common to me compared to the other towns I have seen on youtube for example. Are there any specific rookie error I did on this one? Is there anything too much of something? What would you change?

@dupedful I've moved your post here as it is the best place to get feedback on maps.