Seasonal tilesets

[Avery]

Seasonal tilesets

No matter wheather you are planning a new farming simulator, want to show some time has passed or just want to implement a neat seasonal system in your game… you will need the tiles to make this idea happen. And while there are some seasonal things existing, most tiles are not set up and optimized for this.

Spring (default)
Most of the default tiles and those you find online are best suited for spring (or summer, they are close), so that is where we start our build. For this example I set up some of the default tiles plus the water from this tutorial.

A1

If we go seasonal, a water without a background saves us some edits and recolors and it looks better anyways, as you can see in the linked tutorial.

A2

Here we just go with some basic grass and paths or in your set, whatever you like.

A3

Houses are essential, and here we can go with one as an example.

A4
Since A4 are basically walls as in A3 and have a top like an A2, I did not include them here.

A5
Since they have something of most of the other sections, those are not included either, there is no special technique involved.

B

This small snippet stands for all of the tiles we work with on B, of course there are a lot more options involved. I also included a tile slot for each season, that way we can for example have a snowman in winter where there is not necessarily something in the other seasons around.
Which means effectively our spring, autumn and winter slot are empty in spring and for spring we can fill in special stuff, like these flowers:

This is the very basic stuff we copy before we do anything else, because to make it even more spring, we could edit in some flowers:

For example we could take this grass patch with flowers, select all the green tones and remove them. Afterwards we can copy them wherever we think it is suitable.

And here we go, we don’t have to overdo it with flowers.

Summer
Good news first: A1 and A3 stay untouched (unless you have grass around your water), and all building related things may stay the same. Generally our motto is: the plants are growing and have a lot of water, they are maybe a little darker and less yellowish for your summer set (unless it is a really hot summer)

A2

Use your color selection and select everything that is grass or plant based. Then recolor it to your tone of choice:

You might want to either save or write down those values, as you can reuse them in the other sets as well!

B

We start with the B tile we had before we edited the flowers in, as they are mostly gone by summer. We also remove the spring exclusive tiles and add in the summer exclusive ones, here some grass tufts.
Now we proceed as with A2, we select everything green and either recolor it to the same degree as the A2 tiles or simply load our saved setting from them into it. After that we might do some finetuning, but usually the result is already pretty good:

And that was it, that was the easiest of the edits!

Autumn
For Autumn A1 and A3 may again stay as they are, and A2 and B start out as in Spring, but this time with a more yellow wilted tone to them:

For A2 this may now stay as it is, but for B, we have some more work to do!

For example, can we use careful eraser work to thin out the trees and bushes, making sure to use an eraser with a hard edge in MZ tiles and to not destroy the shadows.
On the vines I removed a few leaves but left most of them.
Remember to fix the outline, for example by darkening the edge of the “newly opened” areas.

• Tip: if you have the leafless versions as well, you can even poke holes in the middle and have the leaves shine through!

Now it is time for the fun part: copy all your green stuff onto a new layer and recolor it to a reddish tone:

If we then use a soft eraser like one of the acrylic or oil brushes from Gimp and maybe to the same with a layer of a yellowish recolor, we end up with this neat result here:

You might go with more solid autumn colored trees like just fully red or orange or yellow, but I like this patchy style.

As a final touch we might want to place some leaves around the trees (copy and paste from the default ones, just placed around the trunks), and there we go!

Winter
Winter is the season that requires the most of work generally, but not as much as you might worry.

A1
We could leave the water as is, but we just pretend it is a really cold winter and it freezes.
A good start for frozen water is for example this A4 top from the Dungeon set:

For everything we do we will use only one of the fames and copy it into the other slots afterwards, as the frozen water is static.

So first we use color select on everything but the highlights and delete that on our layer. Then we use Selection -Invert and delete everything BUT this area from our Dungeon A4 top.

Then we use the color select to pick all the remaining highlights and recolor them to white or a really bright blue. This can be copied into all the slots and we are done:

A2
Good news! Nearly everything is white now!
We create a new layer on top of your A2 that is all white. Now we create a black fuzzy autotile mask.
What do I mean by that?

Take one of those autotiles that have a transparent background and a nice shape and recolor them to all black and duplicate the layer until the tile in the middle is all black and has no transparency left.
Copy that onto your snow layer mask where you want the ground to shine through the snow:

Now copy your A2 and give that copy the same layer mask as the snow, and then reduce the brightness of that layer (not the mask).
This will give you some shadow around the rim.

And there you go, some easy winter autotiles!

A3

Luckily, there is already a neat Winter A3 tile in the default tiles and most sets come with such a tile as well. Use color select in combination with the eraser to separate the solid snow and drop it onto your A3 tile:

Here I also reduced the saturation of the Autotile as well to emphasize the frozen vibe.
And for your basic winter House, that is it!

B

For B we need the fall base, but with the remaining leaves recolored to a dark bluish green. If possible, swap your plants for leafless versions, that looks a lot better, but not every tree comes with such a version and otherwise you suddenly have a whole new tree or bush in winter. Those winter versions for the trees are not a perfect solution, but one that is very doable! That is why we use those dark green leaves, as they blend in best in a winter set. That also means, we cannot use the winter versions of the trees from the default set if we have 4 seasons, as they are rich and green, which looks very weird coming from the autumn version.
But before we face them:

You can for example use a soft white brush with not 100% opacity and draw in some snow spots on an extra layer on top of the empty vines. The snow lands on the top of your plants. Then simply select everything but the vines, delete that part on your snow layer, and you are left with a snowy vine.

With some of those white patches we can for example treat the bridge and the grass patch as well.
For the trees we have to take a more careful route.

Now we duplicate the layer once, and turn the upper one invisible for the moment. The remaining layer is recolored to a bluish dark grey and duplicated, so it looks about like this:

If we now turn the layer back on and zoom out, it already looks pretty snowy:

Though the patches are still pretty separate, which might work on a fountain rim, but for the trees it looks a little off.
So we add another layer and use the Smoke brush - or a similar soft one with an irregular shape on a low opacity and carefully close off the gaps. They shall not look fully covered, but also not completely “naked”:

Now, scaled down and with everything outside of the trees removed:

This is already really close to what we want… but!
Now we have white on the sides and top of the tree, which will blend perfectly into the snow… we need something to fix that.
If we now disable the layer with the trees and add an all blueish grey layer that is set to the mode “Burn”, our shadows in the snow will become this color while the white stays white.

This will also affect the contrast, so you might want to try around a little if you do this, other methods are using the color curves and recoloring tools.
Now we merge these two layers again and we can then merge it with the now turned on layer with the trees:

Now there is one last thing to do, with a hard-edged eraser we erase all the stray leaf edges from the crowns:

And there we go!

There are more ways to get good results than just those, but if you need a quick way to a 4 season set, here you have it!
You might have other ideas on which colors to pick or which saturation, whatever floats your boat. So if you thought about implementing seasons in your game, you now have the tools to do so! Have fun!