BGP – Base Tileset

Howdy ho!

A new game project for school means more blogging. This time it’s a futuristic metroidvania style 2D game that focuses on 2 player co-op. With magnets!
It’s called Scrap Pirates and is, obviously, super awesome.

During the course of the project I will post about things that I am working on for the project, and a bit about the process and reasoning behind them.

For this post we can take a look at the base tileset for one of the areas in the game that I’ve been working on this week.
First of all we decided to use a tileset to be able to create large parts of the game with ease using little resources, then being able to add variety by other, non tile-based assets for more important environments/objects. Using simple square tiles as a base also helps with the whiteboxing process of the levels, allowing the Level Designers to create a base level and then simply replacing the tileset used, which in Unity is usually not much harder than updating the image file.

The main focus while creating the tileset was to make it flexible, while still prevent obvious tiling-patterns or broken edges.
Preventing broken edges is not a particularly difficult task, although a bit time consuming. If we take the first three tiles for example, I started by making the corner pieces (after previously having the base lineart done), making sure that they fit together without making any obvious breaks between them in lines or shading.
Then I moved them apart the length of one tile, allowing me to create the tile between. To start this one however I copied the ends of the corner tiles that I know already tile well, placing the edge from the right one to connect with the left, and vice versa. The middle tile will now already have perfect ends, and only the middle part will have to be created new.
This middle tile should now be able to tile with itself as well, allowing you to make continuous surfaces.

The finished tilest

Showing the tiles in use.

Other times when this approach wasnt’ really applicable I did however create selections to paint within, matching edges to one another. A bit more fidgety, this may leave some minor differences between edges, but this wasn’t a major problem here as the relatively low contrast between many of the shades requiring this made it rather forgiving.

To add some variation in the tileset I decided not to make the top and bottom exactly the same. As a result I also decided that the patterns on the tiles should be broader and more accentuated on the top parts of the tiles. This all became a bit trickier than I had thought and ended up taking a bit more time than I had expected.
This because a lot of time had to be put in exactly how the tiles would fit together, how they would tile and where unwanted edges might occurr.

To add some variation to unused space I also added the fading blocks to the right so that the areas of the level not used don’t have to be a constant bright grey, or require a lot of work adding additional assets to break monotony. This may however still be needed to some extent in certain areas as the simple “fade to black” effect may become a bit dull if used constantly.

Overall I am rather happy with how the tileset turned out, it fits together pretty well with the backgrounds and characters we have aslo produced.
Although this tileset will likely be adapted to fit the other planned areas for this project, and will probably look pretty good there as well, if I had to redo it from scratch I would most likely keep the tiles more uniform, using rotated versions of the ceiling for walls etc, and creating two or even three of these simpler tilesets instead of trying to create too great variation in a single tileset.

That was all for now. Have a good one!