Tiles
We are going to make some tiles first. Tiles are, as you might know, what you will build your maps with. Now, for the overall graphical balance of our game, it’s wise to pick a standard size for your graphics right now. Something like 8x8, 16x16 and 32x32 will do. Now let us make an old timey industrial tile.
Outline
We start with the outline. You don’t really have to, but you will find it is a nice template for the rest of the work. Just mess around a bit with black pixels.
Now that was easy. It looks industrial already.
Picking some colours
We are going to use this tile a lot. It will be an obstacle so it should be clear, but we also don’t want it to piss people off. So we will pick some nice clear colours, not too bright either. In this case we only need one colour for now.
We have a coloured tile. Shall we make it pretty? There are a few things we can do. Shading and shining, getting rid of outlines (or not) and adding arcane little details.
Shading and shining
For what I call shading and shining we aren’t going to use a lot of colours. Two or three will actually do. We pick a light source, in this case the top. We start with the basic colour, pick a lighter shade and a darker one. Then we get this:
We made the top of the tile a little lighter and the bottom of the tile a little darker, because the light comes from above. This looks fit enough to be in a game already, but we can do more. We are going to add little shiny things in the form of reflections. Light doesn’t just come from the main source, it reflects as well, meaning light comes from other directions, only not as strong as from the source itself.
Now we have a shaded and shiny tile. We are done now unless we don’t want to see that outline anymore. I don’t want to see it.
Masking the outline
We are going to get rid of all the black pixels now. Let’s start with the bolts, or whatever they are. I want the player to see them, and right now we only have one pixel for them. We have to use that pixel to the max, so we make it white.
Now as the bolt it sticking out a bit it’s likely to drop a little shadow on the tile, we do this by putting a single darker pixel under the bolt.
And we have nice bolts. Now for the black square around the tile. You can replace it by one colour or use a little shading again. It will turn out like this:
And we have our first tile. We will make some variations on this to be able to build a nice map. We copy the base tile and change it around a bit.
Platform tile
We start with a platform tile. We want something you can stand on, so we make our base tile a little shorter, like this:
And we add something to stand on, and it would be nice if it stands out a bit. We give it the same treatment as the rest of the tile:
Outlined
Coloured
Shaded
Done
And that’s the platform tile done. Now we want a background. We take the first tile again and make it a little darker. Of course we stay within our palette.
Or wait, let’s make two versions:
With the tiles we have made so far we can build a simple map. Of course you can make more variations on the basic tile to make it look less boring. That’s all up to you.
I don't know if the problem is the contrast between tiles or the actual tiles themselves. What kind of building has bolted metal tiles tiles on every inch of its surface? That's not a criticism of the tiles themselves, I think they look perfectly nice, but of the thought process behind it.
Yeah i'd say the contrast isn't the problem, perhaps a large shadow on the background tiles would help? That's what I usually do.
Of course you would need a few of them for all the different angles the shadow would be cast from.
besides contrast, i don't think the gfx at the background should match the "lines" of the ground tiles perfectly. It would look a lot better if they were not so grid-like.
Paralaxing certainly will give the scene better depth perception. At the moment I am lead to believe that the background tiles are larger than the foreground, just large enough to appear the same size as the foreground tiles at that distance. If those background panels are supposed to be the same size as the foreground then making them smaller might add some perspective to the scene. However it would probably have to be some non-coincidental size, like 20 x 20 or something. I don't think you could get away with using neat little 16x16 tiles to give that perception. It's more likely that you would think the background panels were made out of 4 parts instead. The simplicity of a set of graphics fixed into a rigid grid is likely to receive criticism like that, but this style of graphics can be pretty effective in a game when motion is involved, more so when the grid is less evident.
What? Screw the crappy star system? It's just a way for the prepubescent idiots on the site to show how brainless they are by voting things down "because it shouldn't be no.1!", or whatever deep & meaningful reason they have...
Get them posted here - do you seriously care about how many "good-boy gold stars" you get??
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I like the other ones though.
