026 // Tileset Revue: Nigran Cavern
I recently joined and posted a segment of the Nigran Corridor (see the relevant post here and more about Nigran here) to PixelJoint, and I had some interest in the tileset I produced it from. In service of that request, I have posted this artifact-laden, super-ugly version here!
I have posted this ultra-low-fidelity version partially because I am still a bit cagey about the tilesets themselves, but in truth, this is a little bit too ugly for even my liking. I would have preferred to post a "discretely impractical" version that looks good on the surface but would require an overwhelming amount of work to restore to a useful state, but because of the way ASEprite compresses things, my options have been limited to "blobby, bleeding sadsack" or "the real McCoy," and because I am shallow, the result is what you see.
Other than that, I freely admit that this tileset is in dire need of quantization (removing unused and duplicate tiles) and reorganization and that I do feel an appropriate amount of shame for releasing this into the wild in such an unkempt state. "Why, then, did you?" Well, the reason why this image has so many gaps and strange spaces in it is because I wanted initially to leave room for future additions should I end up in a position where I absolutely, positively had to have some special new tile that could not be derived from an ad-hoc layering of existing tiles or 'crumbs'. I could simply add a new tile in one of the vacant spaces, refresh the map editor, and be on my way again with practically no trouble.
And this has worked! Beautifully! But the result is that the tileset is not exactly as presentable as I might like it to be midstream, and I would say that I am midstream with it right now; towards the end.
Anyway, that said, it is incomplete and please be kind to it in that way when you consider its quality. There are only a couple of Nigran maps left, and I can thin down the empty spare and arrange things nicely once they have been set up properly. Then! O, THEN! shall you truly see a More Elegant Tileset. And not before. :1 In the meantime, here are some numbers!
### ### ### ### ### STATS FOR NERDS! ### ### ### ### ### --NIGRAN CAVERN TILESET (v.2d, c.0170505) Tile size: 16x16px Palette size: 19+2 (19 colours + 1 hideous magenta value + transparency) Tile count: 600 (466 graphic + 131 unused + 3 note) --NIGRAN CAVERN, CORRIDOR, TILE DIST'n (v.7, c.0170505) Chart size: 32x15 tiles x (3+1) layers Tile elements*: 918 used / 1920 max. Tile variety**: 260 / 466 unique tiles.
`* This is how many grid spaces have a tile graphic assigned to them. This map is 32 tiles wide and 15 tiles tall, and each tile position has four layers stacked on top of eachother. Therefore, there are 1,920 different positions where a tile (reference number) may be placed. There are 466 unique tiles in this tileset. The Nigran Corridor you have seen posted is (more or less) exactly one of the very, very many possible arrangements of tiles on a map with these dimensions!
`** Nigran Corridor only uses 260 of the 466 unique tiles in the current tileset.
~ Tiles are pretty neat! ~ Anyhoo, hope you found that informative!
Talk to you later! :y