Posted October 17, 2022 by VolcanLoup
#design
When starting work on Afterschool Adventurers Club, one of the first thing I designed was our templates for the dungeons. Back then we settled on a perspective ala Zelda. To achieve this look, we used 4 different 16x16 tiles:
The tileset for the Forest, our first dungeon in the game, looked like this:
It was doign the job well enough at first. Here's one of my test room built in Tiled:
But... As time went by, there were two main things I started to dislike about our template:
I knew that changing something which our dungeon engine was heavily based on meant a lot of work for both of us. However, we were already wasting a lot of space for the loot and what I had in mind simplified the layout as well, meaning we would be able to add a lot more variety to our tilesets. So we went with it.
The first thing I did was to bump the height of the walls to 4 tiles, and allowing the player/monsters to go behing the top one. Technically, it would be more "realistic" to let them go even lower, but, for gameplay purposes, we decided that everything should always be visible on-screen at all time. Then, I got rid of all that black that would be outside of our room's shape by creating a pattern we can repeat instead. I also simplified the doors, so we would have only 2 instead of 8, and moved cleanly all the animations to a separate file.
Now that we had a lot of extra space, I was able to diversify our floors and add more object behind which the player/monsters can go. Which brings us to our new Forest Tileset:
Which has:
So, our Forest now looks more like this:
Next step: redoing our Castle tileset using this new template!
Cheers,
V