07 Tileset April Preview

I've been working on this on and off for about 4 months now, and although I've been letting mini previews out in the WIP topic, quite frankly, they've been a bit boring (i.e. just basic grassland stuff). I wanted to show off what this tileset is capable of even at this early stage, because I don't like keeping this stuff secretive for long periods of time.

My 06 tileset got to the stage of overuse in the space of a couple of months, which is pretty sad in my opinion. The same tiles were popping up in fangame after fangame, and they have not yet been pushed to their limits as originally intended. People weren't even considering palette changes until I mentioned it, and fangames were being marked down because "IT HAS BLACK SQUIRREL'S TILES AGAIN SO UNORIGINAL ((((". This shouldn't be the case, so I have worked for all these months creating tiles with hundreds of possibilities, rather than basic blocky land and simple stuff. You can probably see where this is going...


...and if you can't:

(Credit to Treeki and Thunder Dragon for backgrounds)

Basic descriptions of each if you're wondering:

Top Left - It's a castle, but it's not a crappy boring grey one. It started it's life tryng to be a lava-type castle, but after looking more and more like Henford's Super Mario: Dark Horizon, I made it more cave like. Probably a bit out of date now, but hey, they'll all be eventually.

Top Right - Bonus room, inspired by that bonus in Guinea's SMB:DDX. Simplistic, but works. Notice the different blocks. I've said before that there are 6 types to choose from.

Bottom Left - Mushrooms. You can tell the mockupness since the layout of those mushrooms suck for platforming games, but who cares. Now you can build them anyware, not just upwards.

Bottom Right - "NEW" Doomship. Actually it's not, but I've yet to make decent Doomship tiles so I went for a metallic one. You can go nuts with bullet bill launchers as well. That brown "metal" part underneath is actually from the same set of tiles as those huge block things in SMB3... who said they couldn't be used elsewhere? Again, the fact that this mini ship is armed to the teeth shows it's a quickish mockup, and parts will probably be changed before a final release.

The reason why I'm showing these off in the first place was because they were originally created for testing purposes. They've outlived that purpose now, so there's no halm in you people seeing. Again there's a very likely chance a lot of it will be changed.

By the way did I mention all these fit under a palette of only 32 colours? (The foregrounds that is).

So yeah, I really need any pointers for improvements. I want this to be as good as possible before a release. I don't care for any problems in terms of choices of colour, you'll easily be able to change them on release (and have to, in order to get replicas of any of these images), but if there's anything that looks god-awful please say.

(btw these have been JPEGed to stop people stealing. If you steal them in this state, you're a moron.)

Oh man oh man oh man oh man.
Seriously, that's really really awesome!

Although it makes me sad how after the release of the sheet, it'll get overused to hell.

Let me just say, that I cannot wait! Those look awesome!

Probably, but I've taken as many precautions as possible to try and avoid this. A large section of the sheet is just devoted to different palette examples for quick recolouring, and there's half a dozen different variations of stuff in an attempt to stop two or more fangames looking the same.

It's up to those who use it to actually bother to change the palettes though... and I have a feeling this might not happen, even with all this attention I'm giving the colour replacement tool. Whereas I can count on forum users to make the best use of this sheet when it's released, the site viewers will probably abuse it regardless.

I like how these look, but I dont like the mushroom ones for some reason.

Awesome!!!
It doesn't look JPGed to me, though. And it's in PNG format.
Still, great previews. If the final sheet will be better? Is that even possible?

I have a hunch you're right. However, even if they do get overused, all those fangames will be looking pretty snazzy, because those tiles look excellent! Very nice.

It's a PNG but it has the standard JPEG artifacts.

I saved it as a JPEG, then again as a PNG to save loading time I didn't want it too JPEGgy though because I still wanted a somewhat clear image.

These examples only show off a small percentage of what the sheet currently contains (and will contain hopefully), so yeah, much more to come.

The mushrooms are too over-dithered. To me that screenshot looks ugly. Everything else looks good and up to your standards. :>

Looks great BS.

Oh my, these are godly!

it looks like it's coming along well. Much better then the last version if you ask me. I love the way it's neatly put together, and complex. It would be wonderful to see a fangame have the unique level designs of what these tiles can do.

These are looking much more expansive and the shading or the colors and detailing you did on the tiles are lovely. Really cool the way the shading goes to black makes it stand out more, and looks nicer.

Hope to see more previews coming up, if you do add anymore. These are very interesting to look at. Also I need to ask are you going to make backdrops?

I think it would be a nice addition to add to the whole collection of tiles you've made.

Oh and about those crits Rep gave you:

I think also the mushroom's are a bit dithered too much, I think more forms of texturing would spice it up and make it look better.

This post has been edited by Josiah on Apr 17 2007, 05:59 PM

I like 'em, though the Bonus Room floor looks a bit dark in my opinion.

Dude, Me you and Josiah should like.. collaberate on a tileset, we'd have the ultimate Super Mario tileset.

Sweet.

It looks very official, and I'd use these too, because there are a variety of AWESOME puzzles I could make with all these sprites.

Backdrops are something that I usually don't have the patience to do, but depending on the popularity of this sheet I may give it a try afterwards. There's no way in hell that I'd be able to stick backdrops on this sheet as well as the foreground stuff - it would just be too big

The mushrooms pain me because the palette I chose without thinking ahead will almost always make them look strange. It's likely that they will be improved upon since I'll probably be including SMW-like bases into the mix, but thanks for the input anyway.

...Those are the best background tiles in the world.
This is way beyond awesome.

This post has been edited by Iceman3k on Apr 18 2007, 02:47 AM

I love too much shading, so in that case it isn't too much.
GREAT WORK!
I can't wait for the finished version.

It's part my fault, because of Ultramario engine I released public source of. It came with your tileset06.


Looks really neat so far, keep it up. And if space scanty, you can just release multiple sheets.

And one more thing: That 'castle' looks nothing like castle to me.