I’ve been learning tiled, and designing each individual tile, and create maps. However, I’m finding myself not having a lot of fun with this process because it’s not giving me the big picture and the little details I would enjoy designing. I’m missing some kind of process/technique here and I don’t find any videos/tutorials on these things. Just speed drawing videos that are hard to follow.
My choice of software is Gimp, I’m a total beginner, I’ve been a beginner for a while now. But I have always been inspired by many video games, starting from secret of mana, Chrono trigger, to Hyper light drifter. I enjoy action RPGs. I can understand designing sprites, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to create total maps with backgrounds with just these tiles. It seems like a very tedious process and was wondering if there was another way.
I see some videos where some people draw the whole map in Gimp from scratch, no use of tiles. Is this a feasible method? If so, do I have to bother myself with screen resolution and things like that? I know with the tiles, each tile is 16x16 because scaling that would be a piece of cake later on. But I feel that if we can design the map from scratch, then add on the little objects that are designed separately, it would be nicer. I have been concerning myself too much with screen resolution stuff, and sizing of these “tiles” that it’s impeding my process.
Help would be appreciated. I mistakenly posted this in the 2D forum, but didn’t know there was a game design thread here.
I would only use pencil on paper for concept sketches, rough sketches etc. Besides, these days, I really doubt anyone uses pencil on paper, scan, then use tiles based on that. That would take a lot more time and is entirely inefficient, which is why I’m pretty sure there are other tools available for artists. At least from what I’ve seen some use photoshop, gimp, pixel drawing software for faster results.
I’m looking for ideas and better efficient methods of drawing backgrounds and maps.
Why would you use pencil on paper for modern video games?
Basically everything I make is drawn on paper first. It gives you time to prototype in freeform. Sometimes I’ll expand on it in Photoshop to get an idea of colour.
There’s really no efficient way of doing this- you just draw it! If the problem is placing tiles, write a tile placing script that takes some ASCII map or something and generates it from that.
Thank you for the response!!! Will look into these! I’m just looking for other techniques of doing background design. So this helps a lot!
I used to think that method was done a long time ago before wacom tablets took over and pretty much everything can be drawn into a laptop/PC. Yesterday I was finally able to draw a decent “room” with just three walls, and a floor. I think I’m getting the hang of it but I was just looking at what other people do to see other techniques maybe I can implement for my own projects.
I think you’re right. Just draw it is the only answer! Thank you!