Working on tiles for my last pack allowed me to understand how it works, at least partially, and I must admit I found this really fun, even if it's a little more complex than building "simple" placeables. After working on some variations of the stock tiles, I thought the next step would be to try to create my own tileset, something I would not have thought possible some months ago...
How do you build a tileset ? I have absolutely no experience in this, but I think the first question you have to answer is : what kind of tileset do you want to make ? A lot of ideas ran through my mind... I first hesitated between an icy cavern and a catacomb. But finally, I choose an environment that I wanted to see in this game for a long time : a dungeon !
I know, some of the stock tilesets can make very good dungeons, particulary the crypt. And RWS made a really nice dungeon tileset some years ago (I hope to be skilled like this one day !). But it's not exactly what I was looking for. What I wanted is a kind of old-school dungeon : cold, dark, with low ceilings, narrow hallways, rough stone walls covered by moss and mold, worn slabs... something creepy and gloomy, ancient but not ruined, exactly like this.
I was greatly inspired by the legend of Grimrock, and if you look closely at my tileset, you'll see that I took some inspiration in this excellent game.
So I began to build the first tiles during the last two weeks. And here are the first results :
- screen 1 : hallway (yes, the dwarf is back !)
- screen 2 : grate and pit. The grate is a placeable I created for this tileset. I tested it in game, and it's really funny to shoot monsters, safely standing behind the bars... the only problem is the monsters can do the same:lol:. I put anchor hooks in the tiles, so it's really easy to place this grate quickly and with precision.
This pit tile is a variation of the basic "hallway" tile, which is just a corridor with two walls. I'll try to make a lot of tiles variations, in order to avoid repetition (the screen I posted recently, where you can see a drain, is a variation of the "end hallway" tile). But even a long hallway build with the same basic tile looks good, thanks to the textures -I'll talk about this.
In this picture, you can also see a part of the ceiling, which is a tribute to Grimrock.
- screen 3 : grates.
- screen 4 : hallway (can you hear the water drips ?
).- screen 5 : view in game. I made some tests with companions, to see how they behave in this new environment. The result was very good, they had no problem to follow me, and they never got stuck on a corner, even in a complex map with lots of corners and pillars. The monsters behaved very good too, they ran after me to cut me in pieces, archers turned around pillars and walls to have a clear line of sight on me...
Just a word about the textures. It's not obvious, but all the textures used in this tileset -except the ceiling and the moss- were made with only one stone wall texture I already used for the dungeon pit in my "pit and entrances" pack. I tried to use different textures for the wall and the floor, but the results were not very good... the two simply didn't match, whatever the textures I used.
So I took the stone wall texture, and used its stones to make slabs, pillars... a difficult work, since I'm not a graphist, but at least this dungeon seems to have been build by only one architect.
For now, all the basic tiles are finished : all combinaisons of walls, ceilings, corners. I'll now make some variations I have in mind and polish some textures. After that will begin the hard work : making the doors ! And probably some metatiles...
Thank you for reading me (and sorry for my awful english), and keep building !
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