The Resource WIP Thread 3

Understood. o7

I see what you're talking about. I think it will be more clear when I add flooring, but until then you're right. Any idea on how I can fix the problem? I've been wanting to indicate that those are the tops of the walls better. Maybe a different color or some gradating would help?

I think just giving the horizontal beam a second dimension would help. Like this maybe:

Hmm. I finished the wood grain and added some crown molding at the top of the wall. Does it help any?



Edit: You know, I like yours better now. I think I'll stick with that.

I forget; is doubleposting disallowed here as well, even if you have new resources? Guess I'll find out.

I added a bit of shading to your second horizontal piece and incorporated in into the chimney, which I've started work on. It's actually just a vent for an oven stove to the next story with a fake fireplace on the front. I tried to make it look curved on the corners, but it's also supposed to be covered in tile, so I'm not sure how good it looks. I definitely don't like the faux fireplace on the front right now, but I'm not sure how to improve on it.

The rules for double posting when you have new resources is eased up slightly, but not removed. You still need to use reason when doing it, and are limited to once a day. It's pretty much a case by case situation, so if someone abuses it, they will be called out regardless.

I like this new chimney a lot better. Just at some sort of grate and/or a mantelpiece to that fireplace and it will look better.

Understood. I promise I won't abuse it.

Here's the final product. You were right. Adding those- and modifying the arch and widening the fireplace- made it look much much better. I also tried to phase out some of those ugly black lines so I had more room for the color.

I actually now understand better what you were doing @Robert-Character Creator

I'm excited to begin work on tiles (literal ones!), but I want to design some furniture first. Here's one I made today, that I want to start texturing: a wooden chest.



Is the basic design alright? I'm especially concerned with the fact that the left and right sprites are identical, so there's no way for the player to tell them apart.

You've got the size of things wrong for the side views, but it's pretty understandable why. Because of the perspective the size of the lid should be about 16x25, it's not going to be exactly the same as the other view.

Since they look like they're meant to be mapped right against a wall or something, I don't think the left and right sprites being identical is a huge deal, but if you want to make it more obvious, you can exaggerate. Add the bump out of the hinges on the back or maybe a great big latch on the front. Sometimes it's okay to sacrifice a little realism for the sake of clarity.

Okay, I'm out of patience for silly furniture; let's do some tiling!


Okay, so what do you think of these? Are the patterns too busy? Too vibrant? Dull? Where do you think you'd see these floors at?

Too busy or not is going to depend partially on your sprite. If you've got some sort of Paper Mario sprite going on with a big bold black then white outline, then you have a lot more leeway than you would with a Hyper Light Drifter style lineless and low detailed sprite. Another thing to consider is visual fatigue. If you've got a whole lot of high contrast and highly detailed patterns everywhere, it can be exhausting to look at. The eye needs places to rest. Also, high contrast, high detailed is a great way to say "this is important" to the brain, so doing that on a floor can upstage the things that actually are important. It also says "this is closer" so you might accidentally make your floor look higher up than the stuff on it. Finding the right balance of just interesting enough without causing any problems is probably the most difficult part of making any repeated tile.

TLDR: It depends a lot on the context you're using it in. Do a mock up first to know for sure if it's too busy or not. However, that lower right one is probably not going to work in even the most forgiving of contexts.

Firstly, thank you for the reply. I always appreciate your help. :)

You actually helped me design my sprite, so let me just insert it into the scene...


I've modified the lower-right one to be less contrasted. The blues are less sharp, and the white 'stars' are now grey and in fewer numbers.

The tiles are for the following locations: Top-left: Castle's Kitchen; Top-right: Castle's Guest Room; bottom-left: King's Bedroom; bottom-right: Church (A very story-centric location).

I am worried about visual fatigue with the top right one. Should I tone it down a bit..? Let's test it out.

It could work, but I think it should be toned down a touch in contrast. If the furniture is bold enough it won't matter, but right now it's upstaging the orange. Orange isn't used to that.

I like the toned down blue and grey tone tile. It's not as loud now.

Something you can do is have the complicated element be in a small but impressive spot. In interior design if someone wants a really bold color, often they'll design around that color, but only use it in rare but bold places. The couch won't be bright blue, but the pillows will and the couch will be beige instead. The wall won't be green but the vases will, the wall will be a ruddy grey. Stuff like that. The result is often that small bit of color pops out from the rest and takes a lot of attention, making it seem used more often than it is, but also not being so exhausting to the viewer. So using that same principal you can use a complicated floor in a place where it can show off, but not be overwhelming. Like a place the player won't walk, the bottom of a pool for example, or outlining a more mundane tile or just a single square in the corners of something. You'll get the visual interest without the drawbacks.

I've lowered the contrast by replacing the tan color with a more saturated one. It lowers the contrast quite a bit.


I hear what you're saying. This floor, for instance, won't be everywhere- it only is used for this room. Other rooms have more boring, flat, tiling. Only special rooms get these fancy tiles I've been working with. Shame, because they aren't nearly as fun to draw! ;) I think I'm going to have the edges of this room have this tile, and then have something more simple fill the void.

I've finished flooring most of the rest of the map with a generic stone slab. Just a little noise filter and it's looking great in-game!


Despite the busyness of the other tiles, they're restricted to a couple rooms each, and the darkness in-game makes the visual fatigue mostly a non-issue! Thanks so much for your help!

I decided that I wasn't a huge fan of the repetitiveness of my cliff tiles, so I'm trying to add some variance with a tile containing a larger rock.

I'm not sure how well I did with it, so some feedback would be well appreciated. :)

Not bad. A couple of things that should help, don't be too worried about having the darkest or lightest colors touch the middle color or things like that. Trying to buffer one color from another and smoothly transition everywhere isn't always what you want, for one thing you can smoothly transition with far less buffer, for another, sharp rocks isn't a bad thing. Secondly, when doing alternate tiles, you want to make them feel set in, not just placed on top of what's already there. You can alter those other stones around the big one a little too, as long as the transition is still good. On this tile the small bits you can see of the other rocks and unusually large gaps are what's doing this, like the big one is a giant sticker just pasted over the other rocks. Lastly, if you don't mind a little late advice for your cliffs on whole, the size of the stones is too uniform. Mix it up a little, if only to make the large and small stones alternate position a bit. Right now it's very easy to tell that it still tiles at half the size.

So after almost 3 days of mulling @Sharms advice over and playing around with my tiles, I decided that making the ones I had less obvious was a lost cause. So I redrew them from the ground up! :D

I took a lot of inspiration from Final Fantasy Dimensions with these, and I think it shows since the middle wall piece is still a bit obvious that it's a single tile repeated, but I'm more or less ok with the result and will likely be tweaking it to look better over time.

Oooh, pretty! You have a line down the right side of the tile, I think you accidentally went over the tile line when you created the darker side, but otherwise it's a huge improvement. The obvious repeat is gone and it looks just a lot better somehow.

Welp, school is busy right now so it took me like 5 days to do this when it should have only taken me a couple of hours at most, but regardless I've finally fixed the line on the right side of my cliffs.

Turns out it wasn't really an actual line, so much as it was sloppy shading on my end that needed to be fixed.