Game & Map Screenshots 5

[Kes]

@Galenmerth

I'd feel much safer walking round that town now!

Two other things caught my eye.  Cliff to the right of the steps, second stretch, you've missed a bit of shift-clicking, as the tiles where it joins to the left curve back instead of going straight.  The other is your water tiles.  You have only used the tile which is normally used at the top of some water to show a bit of underwater cliff to give a sense of depth and perspective.  I would suggest changing most of it to the normal water tile.

@TimmyTheNerd

Perhaps you could frankensprite something using the wooden seating/bench on tile sheet Indoors_2 as your base?

 

[Galenmereth]

@ksjp17: Good eye; cliff fixed! Thanks for that.

The water is something I'm struggling with to decide on; if I use what seems to be the "shallow" tiles for everything except underwater "cliffs", I can't use water lillies in the middle of the pond. I can't find any way to do this, and this also seems to indicate that this water that I've used is meant for the whole body of water. Taking a look at the sample maps, it's been used like that there, too. I've always looked at it as somewhat shallow water with rocks in the bottom

 

[frederik850]

What do you guys think of this map? I have my doubts about the space between the trees.

 

[cabfe]

@Frederick850:

Is it supposed to be a forest or just a road with trees?

One thing that you can do is try to not have alignement of trees. Moving some of them by only 1 tile can really make a difference in the visual.

 

[Paladin-Cleric of Awesome]

trees tend to clump. Iif your parallaxing, try to put one tree over the othertwo tiles down and a tile to the left or right. if you sort of clump them together at the edges and sides of the map, then I think it looks more natural to only have a few stragling along towards the path.

Though, that applies more if it's a forest Ii suppose.

If your doing it using the editor, I would maybe move the trees a little closer to each other in some places, and further away in others to give a more natural look. clump flowers together sometimes as well. it's ok to have parts that are very cluttered and parts that aren't, nature isn't regimented after all.

I hope that helps.

 

[frederik850]

@cabfe: It's just supossed to be a road with trees.

@Paladin: At the moment I don't think I am ready for parallax mapping. I only have RPG Maker for about a month and it looks really difficult. And I always thought more open places would look kinda boring or bald or something.

 

[Kes]

@frederik850

Even if it's a road, unless it's a road in a park or something like that, you could fill in some of that empty space with lots more long grass, placed randomly.  At the moment there's not much and what there is tends to be in small neat patches. 

 

[frederik850]

@Ksjp: Is this better?

 

[Indrah]

I'll just leave these here~

Needless to say, we're pretty excited D

 

[Paladin-Cleric of Awesome]

And that right there is why I never feel like I can win these competitions (which I assume these wonderful screenshots are for).

Ah well, I'll just have to try harder.

 

[riarawinter]

@Indrah - Those look amazing!

This is a scrapped map from an on-hold game (I've decided to work on something smaller for my first game instead) and the first map I made - I ended up redesigning the location and I've saved this in case I end up using it for something else. There's space behind each building because when I first did it, the roof was three tiles high instead of two and I've never bothered to rework it. The chests, chimneys and waterfall exist because I was learning how to do them.

Spoiler

 

[Galenmereth]

@Indrah: This looks interesting. I really like those interiors. And the forest. And the illustrations, too!

@frederik850: That's better. But try to have some variation in grass shapes; avoid long, straight stretches; mix it up a bit to make it look like it's growing a bit uncontrollably - like nature does. Also, which was mentioned earlier, try moving trees so they don't align perfectly either vertically or horizontally on the grid; moving them off by just 1 tile will help get some needed asymmetry in their placement

Edit: Accidentally posted the folllowing in the wrong thread; it's a video link, and doesn't really belong here I think. But I'm putting it in spoilers in case it's ok.

Spoiler

Smooth volume adjustment of BGS while getting close and far away to the "source". I call it "proximity volume", but it's really just a combination of events, regions (and Tsukihime's region event script) and a parallell process. That process checks if the current BGS volume (a variable) is equal to the target BGS volume (another variable); if not, it adjusts the volume accordingly using a loop with a few frames of wait, where I call Audio.bgs_play to adjust the volume smoothly.

The result looks like this:

 

[frederik850]

@Thanks for the tips, allthough I have only one type of grass in that tileset, so that's going to be difficult. And other question: How do you the water sound effect in your video. When the volume increases when you come closer?

Edit: Never mind.

 

[frederik850]

What do you guys think of this map?

 

[AcosmicDevi]

@Indrah - Your maps look so awesome

@frederik850 - The map looks nice and varied. It looks like a pretty large town.

Here is the castle's throne. This is a 2.0 version. When I first created this throne room, it had a lot of eye-scorching yellow. This is much better.

Spoiler

 

[hian]

@Devi:

Why doesn't the carpet have borders on the inside as it stretches down the aisle?

The upper section by the thrown has an inner border, so it isn't consistent and thus looks kinda off.

Other than that, I like it. Lots of nice details.

I'm wondering about the statue which seems like it could get in the way of a procession though. And, the lack of a back exit stands out as well (what if the monarch gets attacked or ambushed? Where would he run?).

Working on the mystery project, this time making characters, which is taking me much longer than expected.

 

[Ksi]

One major issue - carpets do not work like that. They are either long rectangular runners, squares or rectangles. (Or carpet a whole room.) What I recommend is cutting out the parts under the tables, making the top area all flagstone and having the carpet a runner that goes from the bottom of the screen, up the stairs and ending just above/behind the throne. It will take the player's eye along the most important route, pointing out the throne (and there-fore the King apon it) as the most important part of the room - which is what people are supposed to be looking at. Throne rooms are designed to allow the King to be seen easily and usually were built in such a way as to make the throne the most important piece of the room - an eye-catcher.

 

[Quigon]

Some IGM entry maps.

 

[AcosmicDevi]

@Hian - Yeah, the carpet has been one of my challenges. I wanted the floor to be blue and white with the white highlighting the throne. I'll probably take @Ksi's advice and rework the floor differently. The statue is of the god they worship and another thing I struggled with placing. I think it is probably better behind the throne. I didn't think about an secondary entrance, haha, but that makes sense. I'll make it a hidden entrance, though.

@Ksi - I don't agree that carpet can only exist in those set ways. Carpeting can be cut and layed down in any way. As a wealthy king, he has the resources to have the carpeting customized to look the way he wants. Having said that, though, I do agree that I should change it and your suggestions are good. My issue is, I really want the hard floor to be dark blue with the white carpeting highlighting the throne and I haven't found the right tile yet, but I'll keep looking.

Thanks for the feedback

 

[Sharm]

That's true now, but wall to wall carpet is a relatively new thing, in the time of kings and castles it would have been more than just a luxury, it would have been considered a ridiculous waste of money and perfectly good carpet.