[MV] First Seed Material: Some guidance?

[pawsplay]

I just started converting my maps over to the FSM tilesets, and it's not as plug-and-play as I hoped. I did eventually figure out the trees in the Bright Forest set.

So, it looks like all the doors in FSM are "tall" which means tall buildings. Does anyone else feel this makes standard characters look tiny? Am I worrying too much? Are there other options for character sprites that go with FSM?

 

[Arthran]

I personally don't think that tall doors make the regular characters or buildings seem particularly small. Rather, I tend to think that the default RTP door size just seems freakishly small.

I mean, a RTP door is 48 px high, which is exactly the same height as a default-sized character. But in real life, is your door literally the exact same height as you? I doubt it. I'm considered pretty tall where I live, but I still usually have at least a good 6-12 inches of extra space between the top of my head and the top of a door. So RTP doors always look like little hobbit doors to me.

Similarly, I think that RTP doors look freakishly small compared to the height that most people build their walls. Seems like most people build their walls at least 2 tiles high. So if your door is only 1 tile high, that means that the wall is at least twice as tall as the door. Single-story walls in real life aren't generally like that. Like, just kinda eyeballing my closet door in my bedroom right now, it looks like my door is probably about 85% as tall as my bedroom wall is.

So to me, FSM doors look pretty normal, even without you needing to increase your building size (unless you're currently making your building walls only 1 tile high or something.

 

[pawsplay]

It's true walls aren't generally twice as tall as a door, but there is usually a space over a door. Logically a door maybe could be like 1.5 tiles high. FSM doors are close to that, but a little bigger. I think the moment I realized there was a consistent scale problem was seeing one of the FSM doors towering over a horse. So to use the FSM tiles, I would need bigger horses, and I'd probably want to edit down almost all the door tiles a bit. But then I would also need to edit the windows, as there are no single tile windows. I would expect at that scale for the windows to sit at the top of one tile, assuming short characters. I can't have windows that are consistently higher than the top of the doors.

I don't normally build short buildings, but I was building an outhouse, which really is quite short, and I couldn't find a tile that didn't look just wrong. And just as kind of a general thing, the RTP seems to assume a more top-down perspective where the FSM seems to reflect a more front-view look. Neither of course is really representative but I think as a generalization, yes?

So using the FSM tiles would probably mean using scaled up sprites, at least a little. I am not completely married to a Final Fantasy type aesthetic but moving to the FSM tiles, I want things to mesh somewhat. The more realistic the style, the more obvious unrealistic elements look. A lot of things look lovely and sort of like, they function in the game and it's not jarring. But the Town of Beginnings preview has a set of jail doors that tower over the default RTP sprite. And all the castle stairs are like ten feet wide.

I got as far as modifying some tilesets, using Avery's tutorial on matching RTP tiles to the FSM tiles, for modern elements like cars and stuff. And then I spent a couple of hours using the big tree from the Bright Forest, which was one of the main draws in the first place. And that turned out to involve a lot of shift-clicking tricks to make the appearance and passability to work right.

That's kind of where I got to the point of thinking the FSM tiles might not be right for my current project. Don't get me wrong, they look great, and I want to make them work.

Are you using FSM on any of your projects?

 

[Arthran]

In real life, the average horse is about 5 feet tall. The average door (where I live) on a residential building ranges from about 6'8" to 7'2". The average door on a commercial building tends to range from 7 feet to 8 feet tall. So I personally don't really think it's that weird for a door to tower above a horse.

And despite the fears of what I would see, I Googled "outhouse" just now and then clicked on "Images", and honestly, most of the results seem to show the top of the door pretty much reaching the roof. While I can't 100% envision what your attempted outhouse looked like, I don't suspect that it really looked all that abnormal.

While the FSM doors probably are a tad tall, I still think that they're significantly less abnormal than the RTP doors are. I personally think it looks less weird to have a door that's just a hair too tall, compared to a door that's way too short. I went and looked through a lot of my paid DLCs just now, and literally every single one had tall doors (a couple offered the choice between short and tall doors, but most just straight up had only tall doors). Just recalling them off the top of my head (so I may be excluding some), this includes Time Fantasy, Celianna's stuff, Kokoro Reflection's stuff, Winlu's stuff, Lunarea's stuff, VisuStella's stuff, Pop! Horror, Omega Modern, Shopping Spree, MV-MZ Trinity (which surprises me since it's so closely linked with the RTP), Essentials, and Essentials Set Z. So while I hate speaking for people other than myself, I think it might be safe to conclude that a lot of people prefer taller doors than what the RTP provides.

But at the end of the day, the only opinion that's really important is yours. It's your game, so what's most important is that you are pleased with the way in which your vision is being realized. If you feel that you would be unhappy with your game if you were to use the FSM sets without resizing the sprites or the doors/windows, then by all means, do what you gotta do. I'm just saying that if you were to use the FSM sets without going through that extra work, and I were playing your game, I wouldn't have any problems with it.

Unfortunately, I don't have currently have any fantasy projects of which to speak, so I am not currently using the FSM set. But I do own all the FSM packs, and I plan to start such a project in the near future.

 

[pawsplay]

I think a lot of people are using taller sprites, though.