Great looking tileset. However, I can't find any individual elements to build custom tiles, like there were in previous tilesets. Am I missing something? Also, mountains from the IoL1 are still best looking with them sticking out of their hexes. Personal preference, I guess. :) All in all, great work!
Hey! Great to hear you like it and thank you for the feedback. :-)
> Sticking out
I like tiles sticking out, too, but they are a hassle to setup in some of the map-making tools (if they work at all...), and printing them as tiles themselves (not the map) is not possible without having something cut off. Someone printed the Isle of Lore 2 tile pack and glued them on wooden hex chips, which looked quite nice and something I want to do myself with this pack in the future. But I get the point.
> Elements
There was quite some pondering when I had to make the decision to include elements or not. My approach this time was to paint the tiles as a little picture each. They are so specifically compositioned and painted, with line widths, shading and shadow fitting the overall picture, that I didn't know how assembling them would work without making them look weird. Lines have to overlap at the right places, they aren't allowed to be near each other, because it will result in artifacts when zoomed out, I weighed the spaces within forms, for example tree crowns, with the spaces around them, scaled, rotated and squished them, and so on. Slapping a bunch of pre-fabricated trees together to make a forest would have resulted in me manually editing the result to fit those requirements, so I just painted them directly how I wanted them to look instead. I know this may sound super artsy and esoteric, apologies for that.
Although, within the source files, I tried to separate objects as much as possible. If you open forest_light_summer_0.kra as an example, the trees themselves are separated into own layer groups you can single out respectively copy into a new file and export to png. The thing is, I could do this for the trees, the mountains and some of the bushes, but the approach falls apart with the small grass bushes, grass patches, marks and many of the other tile details. And even for the trees, I would need to de-rotate and de-scale them. In the end, I would have to draw a new set of "generic" elements, which is quite some work.
What's your (and others) opinion on this?