Etiketter
The first month of working on our project is running to an end. It seems very clear to me that we are getting closer and closer to a finished product by the day. Never would I have imagined getting this far in just a month, but thanks to everyone’s hard work we are not far off from our goal of a finished prototype.
While the programmers are working on getting the AI to work properly, us artists are dealing with animations, sprite sheets and, in my case, tiles. The tiles are the essential building blocks that make up the floors and walls of the map. Creating them is a slow but quite relaxing process done in a 2D illustration software, in my case Adobe Photoshop.
Here are some examples of tiles I made this week. I´ve reworked them from last week, to make them look more cartoon-ish and coherent with the theme of our game.
The process is quite straight-forward and intuitive. I usually start off by searching the internet for reference images. Once I have a sense of what I want to create, I start out by laying down the base color and adding some simple outlines for the texture.
The next step is to darken the image a bit, to get the shade I want. The only tools I use are the brush and the eraser. I add a new layer, add the darker color with the brush and then erase away anything I don´t want.
To make the image look more realistic I add some of the darker shades to the stones, giving them some depth.
Lastly I add some highlights and darken the space in between the rocks, creating more contrast.
We didn´t want the tiles to look to realistic, so I gave them a purple tint which gives a colorful and cartoon-like sense, in contrast to normal gray rocks.
Now there´s just one more thing before you leave! If you are thinking about creating some tiles of your own, I´ll give you one final tip. Make sure your tiles align with themselves – meaning the left/right side and the upper/lower sides has to fit together. An easy way to make sure they do is to make a straight line across the image where it will connect to the next tile.
Left one doesn´t look to great does it? If you´re having trouble with this, Tiled is a great software I used to test my tiles in.
Thats it for now. See you next week!
oscardavidsson 
Heya, Oscar.
You write with great and clear detail about each aspect of the process of creating a stone floor tile.
It’s clear why you have done what you have done. You have detailed very clearly how you progressed in your painting, coming from your intention, to the actual sketch of your tile, to the rendering process and its completion. The post is very descriptive not only regarding process, but also with what tools you were using, although I suppose you could also mention what type of brush you’d picked (from the looks of it, a hard round brush).
You could elaborate a bit more on how you fit the tiles together; maybe you could attach a few extra images to show how you do it? “A straight line across the image” could be a little clearer. I am definitely going to check out that software you mentioned though – so far I have been using Photoshop myself for the purpose of testing out my tiles (same role as you, and we are using a tile system as basis for our game too), using the Offset filter on a duplicated layer.
It has been interesting reading about how another graphics artist approaches floor, and I look forward to seeing the final product.
GillaGilla