Objects and Tilesheets
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This week I worked on our teams collidable objects, or furniture. I worked on designing and organizing them into a larger tilesheet. We in Team 4 wanted our levels in Fancy Mansion to feel cluttered so in order to achieve that feel we needed a lot of furniture/objects and decorative items. The planning process began by listing all the objects in a list and counting them. Once I knew that much I designated a preliminary sizes. Each size was counted in tiles, 2×2, 2×3 etc. Once each object had a size I categorized them in order of size and counted how much space it all would take. I did it this way as I wanted to organize all the objects in a certain way.  |
After I had created a tilesheet of an appropriate size I created mockup blocks of the different sizes and laid them out as I wanted the objects to be organized. I had created a tilesheet slightly larger then I needed in case I wanted to change something or add more objects in the future. I find that this is an important step in the planning as I can start writing the documentation for the coders. The Style we have for our game is a pixelated style and the basic pattern is that for each basic color you have one to two levels of shade and one level of highlight. Our perspective is that of a slightly skewed top down so you see the objects from above but slightly from the side. So when designing each object I began by defining each top plane and then drawing the side planes and that being only the sides facing toward the bottom of the screen.
Here is an example of an object. This is a sofa that I did using the procedure I described above. This particular sofa is 3×2 tiles where the first number is x and second is y. Each tile is 64×64 and so the sofa is 192×128 pixels large, these numbers are important as I need them when documenting the tilesheet later. The simple design questions I asked myself when creating the sofa was: Who owns it? What kind of furniture style is he/she going for? The answers to those questions was: Otto, a rich guy and the style is that of a mansion with luxury and a pompous feel. Even though I wanted to make it a bit more extravagant I was not sure how well I could translate that too this style and perspective. 
This is the tilesheet as a work in progress. At first I organized it so that the larger objects were placed in upper left then as they grew smaller they were placed further to the bottom right but as I had to change the size of certain objects I then changed how things were structured, now I try to fill as much space as possible.