While RPG Maker gives you some tiles to play with, I find that really understanding how they work works best if you also know how to make your own. That and, well, I actually like making custom tiles. It takes a while - especially to make a whole set - but I just lose track of time while doing it and it helps me de-stress.
I won't claim to be good at it, mind you, but this is a learnalong so I'll go ahead and explore my process.
I'm using MS Paint. Yep. The basic art program that comes with Windows. There are a lot of tools in more sophisticated art programs that make this faster or easier, but for the sake of this example I want to show that you don't have to know anything more complicated than Paint to make an autotile that works in RPG Maker.
First I pick some greens since I'm making some grass.
This way I have a consistent set of colors to work with to make the tile. I'm no color expert and I'm sure someone experienced in that area would be better at explaining how to pick a good pallet. I just picked some that I thought looked nice together without being overly saturated.
Since RPG Maker MZ uses 48x48 tiles the next step is to make a square.
And I'm done!
Okay, not really. I could actually make a tile that's just a single color and save the details that make it look like jagged, growing grass for the parts where it borders other tiles if I wanted, though. For a simpler style that might be ideal - this is just the stuff your player walks on after all. It shouldn't look so busy as to be distracting. Variation could be done via decorative tiles like flowers added on top the base grass.
But I'm not leaving it here. I might experiment with a simpler style later but this is a learnalong so I'll make it more interesting.
I like to make an asterisk shape of grass. Here I used the middle green for the shape and highlighted the tips with the lighter greens. I added some dark green under the lower edges as shadows.
I also only made a few in the center of the tile. None of these touch the edges. That's because to make sure it loops nicely...
... I cut the tile in half and move the right side to become the left and vice-versa. If I were to copy this tile and paste it next to itself on either the right or left side, the edges would line up perfectly to recreate the first clumps.
Since I know it repeats horizontally I can fill the middle in with more clumps of grass.
And from there it's a matter of repeating the cut-and-paste process with the top and bottom halves to make a tile that loops vertically.
Huh. That bare patch actually kind of looks like part of the grass has been worn down from foot travel. I'll keep this in mind if I want to make a path like this sometime later.
For now...
More filling up the middle.
I want to do one more switcharoo of the left and right sides to make sure those last bare bits repeat correctly.
And once that last part is nice and clumpy...
I know it loops with itself, but I'll go ahead and place copies of this 48*48 tile next to each other so I have three tiles vertically and two horizontally. If I just wanted this patch on it's own I'd be done, but to make it an autotile I need the arrangement of six.
One last thing...
After letting it sit for a bit I decided the initial greens I picked blended together almost too much. I recolored the tile with a bit more contrast between the light and dark shades.
Again, that can be done in Paint if you'd prefer not using a fancier art program. While the tools available in a more sophisticated program can get the job done in a number of more efficient ways I do want to show that Paint can recolor things too. And I don't mean using the fill bucket on each of the different pixels.
Normally, Color 1 is the color of your brush and Color 2 is the color you erase with. But if you hold down the right mouse button while moving the eraser tool it’ll replace any Color 1 pixels with the second color. In the example above I’ve started replacing the lightest green with my new set’s lightest green.
While I do actually have a complete autotile with just this one tile in a group of six of itself, to really show why this is an autotile and not just, ya know, a tile, I'll have to make something with clear corners.
