Hi guys!
Arturo is here
I'm new over here, so, I want to receive some advices about one of the maps that I recently made.
Feel free to tell me everything, I want to read all your opinions and advices about how to improve the designs of my maps.
View attachment 179555
As you see, it's a very simple forest, with default graphics and some free resources taken from the internet. I added a free flesh threes, because the forest is slightly corrupted. Those demons are enemies, I'm using ABS (I will change the sprites of the enemies later).
The art styles of the trees seem to clash a little bit. Variety can be good but not when there are opposing art styles. There is a very high density of detail in those autumn trees, but the green ones lack that, having a bit more of a painterly look. I will say though, that your tree placement is pretty good, and it looks natural for the most part.
Your path is also strange as well. If your path is not man-made, it might be better to add some grass surrounding those areas that are meant to be paths, just to make it look a bit more natural. If that's not a possibility, for instance if all the grass from this forest has been "corrupted away," that might be a bit easier to pass off. I know it's hard getting great paths down when your tiles are a bit limited and you are going for a certain style.
On the bottom, you've got a good thing going for directing a path to another map, making it so that the players can only go in one spot. I would say that if you add another tree at the bottom left, just the top tiles of it, to go over those weird plants, it would look a bit more natural instead of looking explicitly like the only reason that those are there is to guide the player. Doing something similar up top, making it so that the player can only get out that way, is something you should do as well, since right now the player can explore the entire top horizontal line of the map.
Here's my map! I worked on this for a very long time and I still have 5 more like it to go.
It is the path from the Komura region to the Grizz region. To the top is Komura, and to the bottom is Yorough Town in Grizz. To the left and right, the mountain range continues, leading to some dungeons, side quests, and a character you can recruit to your party!
The Grizz mountains, called the Glilnor Range, are an intense area, full of brutal cliffsides and strong monsters. Most Grizz people do not travel through these mountains if they don't have to, and they even banish the worst of their criminals up there as punishment.
The bottom right is blank because the player will never see it. There are a few parts that look a bit weird, as far as the cliff sides just shooting straight down, but keep in mind that in the player's perspective, it doesn't look as weird.
As a little bonus, here is a kind of "time lapse" of the development of the map:
Tileset is FSM, using QMap and some VisuStella plugins
