Posted February 16, 2021 by assertchris
I spend some time working on the third starting map. The idea is that it's a rocky area, where there are respawns for rocks (for trade). The original plan was for verticality:
...But, given the art style I've chosen (mostly to create assets in the allocated time), my hours of effort in creating the cliff face turn into something that looks like a cobble stone walk-way:
Looking at the fences, it makes perfect sense. The perspective is almost entirely top-down; so any tile sets I make need to express their verticality in 2-3 pixels. There's no way I can make the detail for a cliff face in 2-3 pixels. I have to try something different.
The solution, I think, will be to replace the cliff face tiles with a chasm tile. I can shade a drop off in sets of 2-3 pixels, and make a semi-convincing chasm to separate the bottom and top sections of the map. What was going to be a ramp can now become a wooden/dirt bridge.
I wish it hadn't taken me so much effort to discover this problem...