Game & Map Screenshots 12

The two things are not mutually exclusive. If the area immediately around an elemental sprite (which is what I assume we see in the video) were brighter that would still allow you to have the other parts darker.

You have at least 2 ways of doing that. One is a lighting plugin. Another (if you're not using one) is to have a picture of a darkish brown, except for above an elemental sprite which would have the dark cut out and a suitable shade of fire put in, Gaussian blurring the edges. Then in your show picture command you can set the opacity to whatever gives the strength of darkness that you want.

I used to have a visibility range script on this map as in all the other caves, but i turned it off on this one, it was to dark and to make the visibility circle around the player bigger, they had to use a torch or something of the sorts, and i feel that using a torch inside a fire cave would be strange, but now i see it more clear, thank you to put some light in my mind.
I guess i'll be parallaxing this map as well, make it feel more like a cave and turn the script on again.
Thank you again for the heads up.

No need to parallax the whole map (unless you actually want to) as the show picture option is above the map.

Actually, just turning on the script again, makes it feel more like a cave of sorts.

@Arkhanis You're right, that already looks a lot better.

Alright, it's time to post my first attempt at a parallax map, and overall my first serious attempt at a map in general. Hopefully by posting it here I can get advice, because while I'm satisfied with it as a first attempt, I still have a long way to go and mapping is a skill I hope to excel in. Once I get this map through the court of public opinion, I still have to work on shadows and lighting. I had to put the map image in an Imgur link, I think it might've been too big to upload into the post.




I'll also leave some details on the village below to sort of explain my thought process/decisions. While I'm not going for pure realism, I am going for some level of immersion.


Please let me know what can be improved or what should be changed, both in terms of overall mapping as well as the parallax! I'm very interested in learning from the pros.

Edit: Trying to get the Imgur link to work. xD

@Descendancy You're going to probably hate my opening remark, but I think if you're just starting out on parallaxing you might benefit from hearing it. And it's this. If you hadn't told me that map was a parallax I would have assumed it was just made in the editor. It seems to me that parallaxes should be used when you want to do something the editor cannot do, otherwise the massive amount of extra time needed, as well as the far bigger file size it produces, doesn't make it worth while. I would like to suggest that before doing another parallax map you clearly identify what the 'extra' will be that the parallax is going to bring.

You also said that this was your first serious map in general. I would strongly urge you to learn how to map in the editor first so that you can quickly and easily change things around dramatically. It's far quicker to move a house in the editor than in a parallax.

Just treating this map as a map and disregarding how it was done - I would concentrate first on getting your roofs right. Take this one, for example



I think what you are trying to convey is the idea that the house extends further forward on the left side than on the right. However, the way those tiles work the more you have, the higher the top of the roof. They do not extend backwards, only upwards. So you have a house with a height of what looks like 7 tiles on the left but magically it only has a height of 5 on the right. If you want a house which extends like that you will have to use a different form of tile. Maybe something like this. This is a simple farm house, done in the editor (as are all of my maps) which extends forward. If you could up the number of tiles of both parts you will find that the total from ridge to ground is the same.



I chose this one for a second reason. Notice the way the ridges of the 2 parts are in alignment and the edge of the roof (where the rainwater gutter would be on a modern house) also line up. Now compare it with your house where you have that sort of arrangement.



Your gutter line runs up the roof of the left hand section and then the end of the roof sticks up out into the air. You will not find a roof like that anywhere in the world. It would be virtually impossible to build, because for the back end of the roof to be that far off the ground, the whole side of the house would have to be built on a slant with the back wall considerably higher than the front wall.

Just some alleyway in one of the occupied cities. Nothing too special, though feedback to make it pop more might help lol

@Kes Honestly it's hard for me to believe that nothing in that screenshot stood out to you as parallax. The flower and weed patches are much more organic than if I had done them in editor, the ground tile mixed green would not have been possible in the editor, the various clutter and placement of certain objects would not have either, etc. They're all extremely minor details, yes, but I think they do make a difference. Or, they would make a difference, if I had been better at overall mapping. And I like to think that these details will make a difference once I am.

And that's the part where I have to agree with you, I should definitely stick to the editor until I have a solid grasp on the fundamentals. And that leads me to the roofs. I'll admit I've been tinkering with the roofs for awhile now and I'm having trouble shifting perspective so that I see what you see. From my current perspective, the first house you pointed out just looks like a wider house due to the roofs. But I'm trying to challenge my perspective anyway, so I'm testing a bunch of house layouts.

The main issue I'm facing is how to make houses using the "simple" wall and roof tiles that both make sense but also aren't just squares. I don't know what tileset you used in your example but it's far more elaborate than anything I have at my disposal, the closest thing I can think of are the RTP Outdoor C roofs.

A lot of failed attempts. Or what feel like failed attempts to me, since they don't look quite right. I got to thinking that the darker roof tiles are meant to be meshed with the normal equivalents to make the house roofs look more logical, but thus far I haven't found a way that makes sense.

These two might work? Technically not squares, though the left might suffer from what you said earlier. The right taking a block from the back rather than the front might work better, perhaps.

I switched back to RTP and am messing with standard roofing as well, but all three of these I assume run into the issue you mentioned of the stacked roof tiles making the house look abnormally tall rather than long.
Thank you for your time, if you have any more to offer I'd appreciate any further advice you can give, while I work on remaking the houses in a way that's both visually interesting and using the tileset I have.

@Descendancy I can appreciate that trying to do something different with the tiles you have is not easy. Until (if) you learn to make your own roof tiles, Candacis has some nice tiles in that style in this post. They are in the spoiler 'B Outside'.

What you can do, as you're obviously happy using an image program (I use GIMP for this sort of thing, but obviously Photoshop or whatever will do just as well), is use the tile set you are using to create something better looking.

In your 'House attempts 1' spoiler, top left. In your image program make the slanted roof to be the same height as the straight autotile roof. Put the slanted roof in a layer above the straight roof and cut the slanted roof edge so that it meets the bottom edge of the straight roof. See the example I posted of my own house to see more precisely what I mean.

Using Candacis' tiles you can utilise the slanted roof in front, behind and to the side to produce a great variety of house shapes. Here is a screen shot from one of my maps to show what I mean. Ignore the grey stone walling at the end of the roofs, it's not necessary and is only a stylistic feature of this particular town.

@Kes Alright, it took me awhile but I think I got something similar to your example.

More importantly, I think I'm starting to understand the overall message of editing the tiles to achieve variation. I'm still a universe away from trying to do a recolour though haha. Do you have any advice to make this look more presentable? It looks a little rough. I'm definitely going to have to go over the top wood railing again and mess with it to make it look better, but I'm stumped on the actual autotile roof.

Also, thank you for directing me to Candacis' resources, I'll be sure to do some testing with them soon. And thank you for your time as well, I don't think I would've thought to try editing like this unprompted.

@Descendancy I'm glad you're beginning to get the hang of it. I personally think that the house you have just done is far better than those you did earlier.

The house you show has a problem which is unrelated to the roof as such. If you count the number of tiles the slanted roof goes back before hitting the jutting out part, it looks like it's 3. If, however, you count the tiles along the bottom line of the wall of the slanted section, it's only 2 tiles before it hits the other part. Simply take out the bottom row of tiles and your house will look a lot better.

I'm not sure if this is what you meant when you said about top wood railing, but I did notice this bit which could usefully be tweaked.



As you can see, your slanting section doesn't quite begin at the junction of the two ridge poles, and it needs to.

A screenshot of a battle scene with a CRT filter like on:

Without it:

Note; Not fully translated yet.

@Kes You're right, I missed that. Fixed the walls, and somewhat fixed the junction. It looks better than it did before though I'll admit there's a lingering feeling that I could make the junction look more natural somehow, someway. I also took a bit of advice from one of Avery's guides and made moved the walls inward by a bit.
Overall I'm very grateful for your help, I know a bit more of what to look out for when it comes to houses. I'm going to get to work on reworking the map to fit those changes, if you have the time I'd like to hear any criticism on the rest of the aspects of that map, since I'm sure the roofing isn't the only issue. Thank you again.

@Descendancy If that were my junction I would look at how the horizontal middle line of the jutting out section's ridge pole cuts across the vertical line of the sloping section. I would erase the horizontal so that it looks like that ridge pole ends where it meets the main ridge (which is what it would do) and extend the vertical line upwards with no gap.

That is how you had it in the original version, sort of. Sorry this is so blurred, but I used snip to grab the image.



Here the vertical line did extend upwards. What I would suggest is that you remove the edging line on the left of the main ridge where it meets the other piece. Also remove the horizontal line between there and the > shape on the horizontal ridge. Then blend the two pieces together so that it looks like it's all one junction piece.

@Kes Steps 1 and 2 went well, step 3 isn't going as smoothly. I'm not sure if there's a specific tool or method I should be using to do this, but I cannot seem to manipulate the pixels to make the edit look natural. If I'm going to be editing tiles in any way this is definitely going to be a challenge that needs to be overcome. So far I've been trying to use the colour picker + paintbrush to do the job.



I'm going to be looking into some RPGMaker recolouring tutorials in the meantime, but let me know if you have further advice. Thank you very much!

I have done a top-speed, so rather messy, example of how you can do the lines for the two sections. These have been done in block colours to show what is needed. You will have to do some gradations. But you dont have to do the whole line each time, only where it starts to turn down. I have indicated this on the lower corner.

Sorry about the lurid colours, but I needed them to contrast clearly against each other.


By continuing the line of the particular colour of the last vertical block along the horizontal ridge for a short while it will make it look more like it is all one piece of wood.


EDIT
I've finally twigged what was bothering me. Your horizontal has no apparant depth because it stops at the bottom of the vertical ridge. This has been done ultra fast so is messay, but the horizonal needs to 'fit' into the shape of the vertical

@Arkhanis Your game looks very environmental and cool.
The look and feel of the game is very... welcoming.
As Kes and ShadowDragon have pointed out, the cave being so bright feels a little off.
Maybe adding one of the Light scripts like Shora Lighting System will work really well with the feel of your game?

Edit: Cave looks a lot better with the Visibility script.
Gives it a much more natural feel.

@Roxus even if its a nice plugin it doesn't work in VXA if he/she is
using that, as the plugin is for MV/MZ :)

@ShadowDragon Oh... Didn't realize its VXA, I have only ever used MV/MZ :rswt