One of the other more practical uses for the tiles...

One of the more practical uses for the digital tiles was for those who do landscape design, and don't have a ton of money to spend on mapping or landscape design software.

A quick run through this evening showed me a couple things:

• First, it is both exhilarating and spooky in a stalker kind of way that when you change the orientation on a Google map, you will actually get 4 different views of property
• Second, I need to do a lot of work on the poor man's flagstone (i.e. broken concrete pieces) tile set
• Third, I need to get my butt moving on creating stack wall sets. 

Aside from those things, I am relatively happy with how easy it was to reconstruct the property, albeit the front yard is too close to the house. Looking forward to doing a redo on this this coming week. Looking to develop the tiles mentioned above, as well as carpet juniper tiles and a few other odds n end tiles.

Experimenting with Tiled

Well, after making quite a few tilesets, making maps has been more fun than ever. This past week, I decided to use the rock tiles to create the first set of cave settings. Unfortunately, although I can use shadowing tiles wonderfully in Tiled, creating lighting tiles is not as productive.

In the first picture, just a quick mock up of a cave network. Placing torches on the wall certainly gives the players an idea of where the light is, however it is just not that defined.

Taken into Photoshop and using the burn tool, several areas are targeted to suggest a difference in lighting in areas inside the cave network. Trying to figure out how to translate this into Tiled this week. 

So far, the results have not been good... wish me luck.

UPDATE: So, here is an updated version of the cave network mock up, using 'light' tiles on their own layer in Tiled. Because the tile editor allows for transparency/opacity, I took down the light layer to approximately 65%. Initially the light tile was create in the scale similar to the map: 64px x 64px. The first trial produced less than stellar results. By taking the tiles and saving in a 128x128 scale, allowing for greater curvature in the lit area - or the light circumference, it does let the viewer know the approximate distance that the light source is giving off and differentiating those areas to not lit ones.

More and more tiles

Many more photos taken today to use as reference and starting points for more tiles. This weekend's endeavor: making stone/water border tiles, water tile, and mountain rock tiles...and maybe an addition on the shadow tiles or two...