OK, onto part II of the caves. Here, I'll be doing these things: Adding new side walls so I can hang stalactite supports on them, changing the floor color to match the cave, making an alternate version of the floor tile, cutting out a part of the walls at the edges so it looks more natural,adding some ambient lighting to the walls, adding a plant, and stalactite supports going horizontal and vertical. Sounds like a lot, but a lot of them are simple and can be done in a few minutes.
So here's the whole sheet. I'll post a testmap shortly.
1) On top left, I have the original brown floor tile. It didn't quite match the cave very well, so making it the same color as the cave helped it out a bit. Wasn't quite a 3 step process, but character Maker has a color slider to the left of the palette, so I was just adjusting the colors around until I liked it. I wanted it overall blue/purple, had to make sure there wasn't too much contrast either.
2) K-hos told me to add another floor tile for variety. So I made it with bigger rocks. I started with circle shapes and made the highlight areas bigger. Cleaned up the lineart, and added another highlight on top to make it stand out a little more. Had to tone it down because it was too much.
3) To the right of that, there's a side wall that has a straight edge. We'll need that for the stalactite connection, if not it'll look like it's floating.
4) Cutting out from the side walls. This part should be a seperate side wall, so don't cut into the only side walls you have. You'll want those to tile. Only the side wall at the end should be cut, so it looks more natural. Usually what I'd do is cut most from the middle, and mostly leave it alone near the top/bottom. This can be applied to both sides. If you have cave walls that tile vertically, make sure that cutting the side walls still has it tile.
5) This is the ambient lighting part. This is not necessary, but can have interesting results. So if you don't do this on the walls, then don't do it on the other objects either. I took the side wall on the right (and only that one), and colored with a reddish purple on the edges of the mini rocks on the wall. You can see on the tiles that are 2x bigger the process I did on it. Then, I did a yellowish highlight. Pink could work too.
6) This part wasn't hard, I just replaced the highlight on the side wall on the left with a lighter more saturated blue/cyan. It looks like it sparkles a lot more now. I'm not going to do this with the middle wall so that should be left alone.
7) Horizontal stalactite support. Basically, the player will go under this, and it will connect from one part of the ceiling to another. It's best to get the shape down first. The ambient lighting here will work in the same way that it does for when you do the side wall. So for the front, I just decided to make some stalactite formations, sort of like what you see on the top part of the walls.
8) Plants! This one was a bit of a pain, as I had to constantly adjust the colors on it. For objects like this, it's good to check out how it looks on a floor tile. After it's all done, I put a shadow. I added some small patches of grass next to it, so that could also add some variety to the map. Only 2 colors for the grass itself, and you could use 1 if you wanted.
9) Stalactite support, going up and down. The middle part will tile, the top and bottom will connect to the ceiling. Getting the shape right is probably the most time consuming part of this one, although it's not that bad. Make your stalactite formations on the top part. Since the reddish lighting that we've been using has been on the right side of the wall, we'll continue it here too. Don't go switching it, if it's blue on the left sidewall, don't forget to do the same on the objects.
Result! 20 colors total.
I think there may be a short tutorial to finish this off and then I'll get working on the tech base. I'll be looking for good pics for inspiration. If anyone has any pics they think will help, feel free to show me them and I'll work off of that.
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Tileset tutorial
