More secret doors

We already talked about some basic secret doors before, but there are so many ways to add hidden passages and paths to go to your maps that we have more than enough material for part 2!

Today we are going to have a look at all the fun things we can do to floor tiles to reveal hidden stairs or holes!

Psst… I heard the evil overlord has a secret way to escape his throne room in case the heroes are near…

Of course your trap door can be less obvious than this, just remember that your players at some point need to figure out they need to trigger something anyhow ;3
For any kind of floor piece that is about to be moved away I would recommend to go with something like the tile in the shot, something that has a rim around and therefore is believable when moving away. This could also greatly serve as hint, if there is a floor that would actually be in “one piece” but that has a clear outline somewhere inside:

Something is fishy about this carpet… we should investigate it!

So what different kinds of animations can we have our floor perform?

Slide away
This is the easiest of the animations, you just have to keep some things in mind when assembling it:

This probably doesn’t look too bad, but by just moving the center to the side, the tile slides into the tile next to it, while there is no clear room for it. Also, if we were going with a hole, we should at least have the wall have some depth!

This autotile here for example is always a great base for such “holes”:

If you now also add some depth to the adjacent tile by copy and pasting the lower row a few time, recoloring the lowest of those copies a little darker and adding some noise in the middle, you have a much nicer hole to work with:

Our tile that slides away will now have to sink down by the height of the adjacent tile and then slide away into any of the directions we have.

Since it sinks down, the tile on the left will cast a small shadow on our “door tile”.
Tip: you can use this little bit also as pressure plate animation, which could open a different secret door!

For the tile sliding away to the left, right or bottom all we have to do now is to move the sliding tile in even steps and erase anything that “vanishes into the wall”. Very straightforward, besides that for left and right movement we need to fix the shadow with each step!

It it slides to the back, we will actually see the front of the sliding tile and that one will also be visible once the tile is fully moved into the wall:


And we are done! Here a quick comparison of the intuitive and the better version:



Turn into stairs
Another very fun way to open up a new passage is by having the floor or wall move and form stairs. Here we will need a different tile though:

This will work for stairs that face any direction and we will have a look at how to create all of them!

1. Front

To break it down, when each row of those stairs turns into a stair step, they need a matching front to the top we already have. In this case for example we can utilize the front of one of the default stairs and match it with one row of tiles accordingly. Here we only need three of the rows to have that front, since their height with the front accumulated is already more than the height of a tile.

To turn those bits into a neat secret stair animation, we have to “move down” the steps ow by row:

Our whole tile moves down by the height of the step (and what reeks over the tile grid gets erased). We keep our two extra steps on the side, since they will be affected by the next step as well:

Since the level of the sunken in tile is lower than the default level, the whole tile becomes darker, we recolor everything to our liking to ensure the difference is visible. Since there is a wall to the left of our sunken in tile, we also add an extra shadow to that side (Resulting Tile #1):

Now we need the next step to sink into the ground even more. We use the version without the side shadow and add the next step and make everything below even darker:

We now draw in a shadow for this new layer, it is even wider, since the step is more sunken in than the one above(Resulting Tile #2):

Then we add the last visible step, recolor everything below even darker:

And add the last shadow, again a little wider than the one before (Resulting Tile #3):


And there we go, the result is the following:

1. Back

The back version is pretty similar to the front, but has its own twists, so let’s have a quick look!
Since we will see where the characters are going when they go down the stairs, we need that “view” prepared. In this case, a black frame to indicate a door works, as long as we keep a floor supporting structure on the top:

That being done, it is time to work with the stair part. Since the whole tile sinks in as it does for the front, we can recycle that part from the front version, just without the “front of the step”. On the left you see the edit of the floor tile that we need, on the right the version with the background we prepared above:


And then we keep repeating the stuff we did for the front, just kinda the other way around.
We subtract the step height from our next step…

… move the resulting upper part down and make it darker plus have it have the wider shadow:

And again, we subtract the stair height…

… move the resulting upper part down and make it darker plus have it have the wider shadow:


Well, you can guess how the last step looks like, but I like to add a little bonus, with a very dark color I draw in the hint of an extra step in the void, teasing a longer stair downwards:

And there we go, that’s it!

1. Sideview

One or rather two basic directions are still missing, and we can handle them at once with everything we learned above pretty easily!
As we did for our sinking in whole tile, we need some kind of wall background, here we can just take the one we had there:

Since we don’t see any front or side of the steps, there is no additional “new” material that we need.
So, we start with the whole tile…

… have it sink in by the height of the whole step…

and add shadow and recolor it darker. Since here the whole tile sinks in, left and right will look the same:

This is basically how things are going from here. The next step sinks in by the height of a step…

… and we darken the new lowest layer and add the new shadow to the left of it:

Repeat…

…and repeat…

… and we have all we need!
We assemble it with the background and are good to go!


With those tools at hand, there are many more secrets for your heroes to find! Have fun implementing them!

Very cool! Will the final sheets be in your MZ thread for use?

How do you make the depressed floor tile in the first example? Is there a simple cheat-y way?

You basically delete a bit at the bottom of your tile and move it down by the same height (like, you cut off 3 px, then you move the whole thing down 3px). Then you select a little part on the left (depending how depressed the floor is, there is no one for all number) and move the brightness down :3

Thanks! That sounds like something I can try.

I am in love with those stairs. They are amazing. ^_^

Wow! Those came out so good!

I knew them all, but I never really figure out how to make stairs back part or how to
modify it down better, but this can help me alot and enhance some of my ways for
my dungeons or change the layout a tiny bit.

I use a different way atm, but I can add some more ways to it to make it looks better.
Thank you for this amazing tutorial and explaination :)

I learn alot from you and its also very user friendly for beginners to advanced users :)

Awesome tutorial :kaojoy: