Tileset Help/Advice/Feedback wanted

[malignatius]

Hello! I'm a designer who's been dabbling with a tileset of my own lately. Mostly for fun.
Unlike most tilesets I've seen, it's not pixel-art and the current tile size is quite large: 128x128 px(!).

My ambition is to use these tiles in either
a) A game, from scratch. (I already have a rough idea of a setting, plot and UI) Game wise, I'd like to do something a little bit different, a game with focus on graphic, story, atmosphere and a sleek UI. "CRPG-ish". Since I have no programming skills (or interest for that matter) this would require me to find a developer (for free) to co-operate with - And I'm not really sure that's realistic.

b) Do a ToME module with my tiles. It would probably be easier than making something from scratch, but it would probably still require me to find someone to cooperate with...

c) Give away the current state of my tiles, for free, and do something else on my spare time.

d) Try to make my tiles so they can be used in some other "major" game. My first idea was to do a skin to ToME, but I'm not really a fan of ToME's setting, so that's when I thought of making a game of my own.

Thoughts, feedback and advice appreciated!

Anyways, these tiles I've been making, would probably require a little(?) more logic than your regular tiles?
The walls are not just square boxes that you can place anyway you like...
- I'd really appreciate if someone would have a look at them and see if it's feasible to use them for random dungeon creation, at all.   




In addition to the tiles in the screenshots, I've made about 40 heroes/animals/monsters, a tileable forest and a complete little viking city with different houses. So far.

[Vanguard]

That looks fantastic!  It reminds me of Wind Waker.

[Krice]

Seems to be a bit backwards game design when you first draw tiles and have a rough idea of the gameplay. It makes the work of a programmer harder if there is no plan. However if there was a plan I think it's not that hard to find someone to do the programming part, even for free. It depends somewhat on how complex game you have in mind. Usually artists and other non-programmers don't understand how difficult it is to create a full feature RPG or roguelike. I think that if you want this to succeed you need a detailed plan of the game, not just some rough ideas.

The other option is do it the right way: join a team/programmer/designer who needs graphics, then wait for instructions what to draw.

[Quendus]

These are pretty nice tiles. Option (a) is plenty realistic - there are plenty of developers around making roguelikes for free, on this forum and the IRC channel. Probably they would be happy to transfer the tiles into a game that's already made in ASCII, incorporate it into a project that's in progress, or (less likely) start a whole new project. In which case they would probably have some requests for specific additions. Like Krice said, generally art flows from game design rather than the reverse.

One word of advice - to facilitate use in a game, the spritesheet would need to be a bit more organised, especially the wall tiles. Try to arrange them in a way that places tiles with similar purposes on the same row or column and adjacent, insofar as possible.

[malignatius]

Seems to be a bit backwards game design when you first draw tiles and have a rough idea of the gameplay. It makes the work of a programmer harder if there is no plan. However if there was a plan I think it's not that hard to find someone to do the programming part, even for free. It depends somewhat on how complex game you have in mind. Usually artists and other non-programmers don't understand how difficult it is to create a full feature RPG or roguelike. I think that if you want this to succeed you need a detailed plan of the game, not just some rough ideas.

The other option is do it the right way: join a team/programmer/designer who needs graphics, then wait for instructions what to draw.

Yes, it's perhaps a bit backwards...I made some tiles, just for the fun of it, and suddenly I happened to have quite a few. That's when I started  to think about making a game. When it comes to the implementation, programing langage, kind of RPG system etc. I'm really flexible. I could probably create some kind of "design document" and leave out those parts.

Joining a Dev team or become the graphic resource for someone else's project is not an option.  - Thats is kinda what I do in my daily work. 

One word of advice - to facilitate use in a game, the spritesheet would need to be a bit more organised, especially the wall tiles. Try to arrange them in a way that places tiles with similar purposes on the same row or column and adjacent, insofar as possible.

Sure, this is not the final layout. Rearranging the tiles is a no-brainer. It's also really easy to export them as individual png images, or use Tiled http://www.mapeditor.org/ to create a TMX file if that is prefered. I should mention that the tiles are made with vector graphics, so  they're scalable (128x128 looks best in my opinion). My original idea was to save the tiles in SVG format, but some people has advised against it.

[kraflab]

The only reason I think it would be difficult to find a programmer to enact your design (at least in this location) is that most people are already working on a pet project.  In terms of finding a game that already is in production to use the tiles, that would probably be easy, assuming there are enough tiles to encompass what's in that game.

[Etinarg]

With tiles this large, you need to "condense" the game somewhat, since the player will see only a fairly small part of the world. But it could make up for a very interesting game, with a high monster and item density, so that the player has a lot to do while progressing, and that small distances feel like a big accomplishment. You'll have to limit ranged combat though, which might or might not be a problem, depending on your monsters and character types.

[malignatius]

With tiles this large, you need to "condense" the game somewhat, since the player will see only a fairly small part of the world. But it could make up for a very interesting game, with a high monster and item density, so that the player has a lot to do while progressing, and that small distances feel like a big accomplishment. You'll have to limit ranged combat though, which might or might not be a problem, depending on your monsters and character types.

Very true!  It would be different, but that's not necessary a bad thing? I think that having a large overview is mostly a legacy from ASCII games, where you naturally would fit a lot of  characters on one screen. In "3D roguelikes" (or old CRPG's like Eye of the beholder) you only see what's ahead of you and that works fine. It's really more realistic that you only see a few feet away when crawling through a dungeon  ...I also guess you could complement with a more simple map that you could bring up. Another option is to have the view scrollable. I think Dungeons of Dredmore have a similar solution.   
The tiles I've made is scaleable so, you could also have to option to zoom or perhaps have a different size of tiles when entering a outdoor/world view.

[Etinarg]

It would be different, but that's not necessary a bad thing?

No, I just wanted to say that game and presentation must match. I sometimes think that roguelikes wouldn't need a run command if the distances between the interesting parts of the games were smaller.

PS: Like Krice I think that once you have a good plan for the game it should be fairly easy to find someone who will bring the world alive. The tiles are very attractive, and I'm sure many will want to make something with them.

[malignatius]

Thanks, I'll get cracking on that document!

[Quendus]

It would be different, but that's not necessary a bad thing?

PS: Like Krice I think that once you have a good plan for the game it should be fairly easy to find someone who will bring the world alive. The tiles are very attractive, and I'm sure many will want to make something with them.

It would have to be a very generous developer to take a full design specification and program it according to order. Most developers would probably prefer to have some input into the design process.

[malignatius]

It would be different, but that's not necessary a bad thing?

PS: Like Krice I think that once you have a good plan for the game it should be fairly easy to find someone who will bring the world alive. The tiles are very attractive, and I'm sure many will want to make something with them.

It would have to be a very generous developer to take a full design specification and program it according to order. Most developers would probably prefer to have some input into the design process.

I would expect that too, for the same reasons that I don't want to be the guy who "just made the tiles".
I guess I'll have to make a description of what I'd like to achieve, rather than a detailed specification. And then be very flexible.

[Krice]

It would have to be a very generous developer to take a full design specification and program it according to order.

I think it would be the best option. If you have done any game design you know it's a tedious process and the less there is the better. Of course you can have your opinion about the game in general, but you know.. why not? Why not just do everything as it is. I think age has something to do with this. I remember when I was younger and had "my opinion" about things and everything else was wrong. It's not like that when you get older.

[Etinarg]

I'd assume that a message like this will work fine to find a partner:  "Hey I have made some nice tiles for a roguelike game, and I also have a few ideas for the game itself. I'm looking for someone to make a game with, someone who's got some programming skills as well."

Don't scare people with documents

[guest509]

Make the game yourself?

Gamemaker is not hard to learn and you can do anything you want with it.

Also if you go on the Gamemaker Forums there are programmers looking for graphics all the time.