This is what I spent today doing:
It took me about 6 hours of work, total. I'm very happy with the results. It is a relief to get this done because I had attempted to make these tiles several times in the past, and they never even looked remotely passable. Today, however, everything clicked into place, and I got it right on my first try. Granted, there are about 120 new tiles I made today, so there may be some minor mistakes, but at least I have something that I can be happy to build screens with.
Since each of these also has a half-tile offset (see the bump on the top part of the beach sand,) this means I can make dirt steps, too:
...This isn't the best example, but you can see the effect. It would look better with GB-style mountains on the sides and you probably don't want to make the stairs too long. Just a couple steps to make narrow passages interesting.
Bonus!
Testing out my mountain tiles.
Lots of other maintenance stuff in the log:
::August 22, 2014::{
Pretty much finished up item and effect sprites. Just a few enemies left to animate.
Got the Cane of Byrna to work properly. I was wondering why it never did anything, but it was because I never set it up to do anything but waste magic.
Got Heart Container Peices to work properly.
Rebuilt Bit and Bot enemies to match Z2. If I'm going to use Zols, then call 'em Zols. These ain't Zols!
Reshaped hammer a bit.
Edited explosion animation to look less Windwaker-y. It looks pretty sharp now.
Made Boon sprites.
I have been staring at these Aquamentus and Gleeok sprites for years. They are still in their Z1 sprites. I am going to eventually replace them with something maybe. Or... I can just delete them and say "nooooo!" to the dinosaurs. But probably not.
I made some zombie sprites.
Started building combo pages finally! Comboed basic ground types and bushes.
}
::August 23, 2014::{
I am setting the flower tiles to bush combos instead of flower combos for convenience. If there was a Flower->Next option, I would use it, but I don't want to do under combos for flowers and not bushes. Save that stuff for tricky things.
Redisgned the ground transition tiles. The complete set might seem a little redundant, but it allows you to give full tile priority to either side of the transition. This should greatly increase the flexibility of ground transitions.
Added a shadow effect to the grass transition and cleaned up some odd speckles.
Went back and looked at the old title screen... That thing is beautiful. But it got messed up when I changed the palette. So I tried to recolor the ZELDA part, and it came out ok. It's really bold and shiney looking.
Made dirt transitions.
I'm not happy with my cracked dirt. It's too messy and high-contrast, so I'm going to try making a new version.
Made new version of cracked dirt. It will be difficult to make transitions, but this stuff looks great. It is way better.
Finished cracked dirt transitions.
Started on sand transitions. I have a good idea for these, inspired by the SD3 sand swirl. It looks good so far -- like actual sand instead of the cookie sandwich I had before.
Finished all transitions. Now I'm going to try playing with dungeon carving to see if I can make a convenient way of using them.
Dungeon carving is a no-go. It can only make rigid squaries, and it take up a whole page of combos with a lot of redundant combos.
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Edited by RetraRoyale, 24 August 2014 - 12:17 AM.
