itch.io

Yeah, you're quite right - it has been people coming from the perspective of old-school wargaming that have a problem with my hex arrangement. And while I've played a few old-style hex games, I'm obviously not from that background so my first thought was toward what was easy to draw for me and looked good in that style.

I have considered drawing a simpler hex terrain style set - possibly lower resolution, definitely simpler rendering - and maybe I'd see about the flat top/bottom for that. It does seem foolish to potentially cannibalize my own sales, but it might be an interesting project (and maybe that's what's most important, at some point).

I've had that requested a few times, but unfortunately it'd involve redrawing a large part of several hundred tiles across all of my tilesets - potentially multiple hundreds of hours of work. I'm afraid it simply isn't an economical project, so I've got to stick with the art direction choices I made initially.

Oh jeez, sorry for taking a year to remember that I've drawn these and haven't released them.

Hey! Yeah, I should get around to it - I've put it off because there's a lot more overhead to uploading a new package on the UAS vs. other sites. (The UAS has to get through Unity itself, and requires an 'example scene', while other sites allow me to just put a zip file up.)

I think what I'll do is wait 'til I can do two packages at once; I've almost got an update ready for the Medieval Armor & Weapons set, so I'll put both of these on UAS at the same time. 

Maybe these will be useful?

That's a very good suggestion. I've added this to my TODO list.

Hi! These are fantastic ideas.

I don't really have time for commissions, but I'll put these suggestions on my TODO list and see if I can get to them sooner than later.  I really appreciate hearing about what you'd find most useful.

The holiday icons are such a great idea, I can't believe I didn't think of them before.

Hi! No solid plans for such an addition, but I'm definitely open to suggestions.

What'd you have in mind, like the sort of whitewashed houses and things? Adobe buildings, nomad tents? (I guess I'm answering my own question with some ideas here, aren't I.)

Let me know what you're interested in and it might spark some inspiration :)

Great idea! Here, you can use these:

   

Well... the deal is basically that I've drawn the hex tiles to fit onto a staggered rectangular grid - imagine a staggered grid made of 256x256 cells where the top and bottom 64px of those cells overlaps the row above and below. This is easy to implement in a modified square tile arrangement - this is not, however, a grid made of "true" hexagons where each side of the hex cell is an equal length, and all the corner angles are the same. In short, I drew this to fit neatly into a square pixel raster format and into a square pixel grid so it wouldn't require any more than basic math.

So (as you've found) the problem arises when implementations use true hex grids and we try to put not-actually-hexagonal tiles into them. My best advice would be to alter the Y scale of the grid cells so they fit the tiles without distortion rather than scaling the tiles, but I'm unfamiliar with Foundry so I can't advise on how to do that. Most programs I've used have been pretty open to changing grid scale, but, yeah, I don't know that one. 

In conclusion: not a flaw on either side, just different working assumptions leading to a mismatch in appearance.

Hopefully it's easy enough to fix?

Thank you for the kind words!

I've actually got almost what you ask for on hand. Check these out:

With these, it's possible to draw the vanes overtop of the windmill then rotate / angle the vanes via code. Not a frame animation, but it should be able to do what you ask. Does that help? 

Well. In short, no (because I'd have to redraw everything). 

The long answer is that the aesthetic embraces the "tileness" so that you don't have to worry about transitions between the tiles because it'd add a huge amount of time cost to the art and implementation - or compromises would have to be made in terms of range of biomes, or in terms of the rendering of the art. Basically I tried to make these as accessible as possible to as many games and developer skill levels as possible.

The solution I would offer is if someone wanted to take these tiles and modify them for their own implementation, it'd take some work on their part, and require art skill, but it is an option.

Unfortunately, no. 

I'll explain: doing a seamless terrain style would require a re-design of the basic assumptions of the set, or a ton of additional asset requirements (by a factor of more than 2, at the very minimum). To avoid that, I could draw all basic land as the same biome - but that's contradictory to having all the deserts, marshes, snow, etc, or I would have to create transition edge sprites for *all* basic terrain types (and there are an awful lot), ...or I'd have to redraw all terrain types as seamless textures (plus variations?) while unloading transition effects onto the graphics coding side as some kind of shader (then I'd still have to draw edge transition masks, probably).

Basically, in starting these sets, I made the decision that they had to be tiles that could be slotted together easily as a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of system (and the coasts/rivers complicate this greatly, exposing the dangerous limits of trying to add very specific effects to a very generally-oriented tile system). To do something seamless would require starting from the beginning while prioritizing a different design goal.

Sorry!

Dang, you're quite right. Just now I tried to draw a complete version of that temple, but I'm not happy about how it turned out. It's on my list and I'll give it another shot - I'll respond once I have a good version ready.

Er, is it not in there?

There should be a decor sprite called temple.png, then hex tiles called hexDirtTemple00.png and hexPlainsTemple00.png.

Hi, thank you for buying my icons!

I drew up some coins and wheat (feel free to use them).

 I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean about logs - just, in a different style? (I do have a set of wood icons that might cover what you're asking, though they're *very* specific.)

For manpower, do you mean like soldiers? If it's specifically medieval, that might not quite fit this icon set... I'll have to think about what that might look like. I do have a few general population icons somewhere in there, maybe one of those could be adapted...

Thank you! 

I have been working on a scifi pack, off and on, for a while now. Glad to hear there'll be an audience for it!

Yup! It's just a lot more work to put stuff online with Unity, so it'll take another day or two before I do those.

Thanks! 

Yeahh, felt a bit burnt out on tiles and have been split between a bunch of different possible directions for asset creation (also, the Unity PR implosion was certainly off-putting, as that's where most of my sales have been... um, historically anyway.) 

Decided I needed to stop waffling and finish something, so why not the most fun option? Thus: Pirates!

Well, I have some good news for you! Check this out: https://dgbaumgart.itch.io/hex-rivers-costs-and-seas :)

Thank you!

Yep, I'll be pushing an update to Unity really soon. (It just takes more work to update Unity vs. Itch.io; think like 5-10 minutes here vs. 30-60m for Unity due to all the overhead.)

Hi! I distribute the assets at the resolution I created them, so what you've got is what I've got. Your best bet would be to use an algorithmic upscaler of some kind, the results actually come out pretty well. Hope that helps.

-- David

Thank you! 

Uh, let'see, about bundles? No plans as such. I guess I'd have to look into how to even do that; it might be interesting on an experimental basis so long as the overhead isn't too bad...

Yeah, great suggestion! I actually found I could put together some icons I had sitting around, so this should do it:

Thank you!

As for your questions: that is, ah, non-trivial to make work between different biome types. It's like, how do you transition from grass to dirt, from dirt to mountain? You could just do an alpha fade, but that looks bad. So some kind of painted alpha mask might be needed, or unique borders per biome, maybe. I have suggested people use "patches" that cover just the edges, and that kinda works, but it's a bit of a crude solution. 

Anyway, seamless terrain across multiple biomes is a problem that requires a bit of thought because there are multiple ways to handle it AND I'd have to redraw a version of all the tiles, AND, worse, I'd have to figure out how to split these new assets into assets - do I do new packages? Add them to old ones? I'm not sure.

Also, would making a bunch of assets which are incompatible with the old ones, or supersede them, be worth the time required? It's not clear.

So, TLDR: I have been thinking about it, but there's no easy and obvious approach.

Hey, thank you! I've considered doing characters, and have even done a set of historical units as a private contract job, but I haven't quite made the leap for this set. Been thinking a lot about what I'd draw if I did, though, so it may yet happen...

Oh, maybe after I get everything set up? I have a lot of content to add still, so I'm going to focus on that 'til it's all done, then we'll see.