luuma
searching for Meaning, offering HA numel
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- Seen May 24, 2022
This is more like an opinion piece to be honest! since art is art, there's no way I can categorically say any one of these styles looks better than the others. Instead of deciding which ones are good an bad, I'm just going to talk about the environment; how fire red does it, then how emerald does it, then how my earliest romhack did it!
A rule of thumb for firered is that if every geographical feature looks like a set of rectangles, you're on the right track. Grass is no exception! It feels unnatural, but retro, and really clean.
Patches of grass in Emerald are made up of blobs and curves, and the grass loops round and tries to look as much like an ellipse as possible.
Then there's the classic romhack look (TM), which looks quirky and unique, and a little bit like TV intererence. The empty squares in the middle of this grassy patch tell me there are hidden items to be found here, more than anything.
The path on the ground is actually more important than it looks! it's telling you where to go to progress. You should pretty much always put a path on the floor, they drag anyone playing the game onto the right track. They also show you which path is a secret side-quest to get an item and which path is important to carry on the plot. This gives you the information to choose between them, so you don't feel cheated by winding up on the wrong one.
Paths are also important because they break up clear empty space. If ever my screen is virtually filled with the same tile, it's time to remake the route.
Firered again looks a lot like an international rectangle festival but man does it look artsy. Turning everything into a solid straight line again does the trick
Emerald has a lovely little path down the right hand side that clearly contains an item somewhere within it. When I 'm surfing and hit a little niche crack like this one, I'll expect an item not to be too far away! The river is made up of steady curves, but it's rare that two corner tiles wind up next to each other on rivers. The curve on the water's edge is really made up of 2x2 blocks!
The first thing you will do with your coastline in a rom hack is make it waay too complex! Look at all those corner tiles. There's also these random 1x1 tiles dotted everywhere that you inevitably surf into, land on, find nothing, and have to surf off again! The right hand edge of the river as a repeating pattern down it which just looks nasty! rivers that are thinner than 2 blocks in width look bad if you try to put corners in them.
If you ever put in a small cutaway that leads to a dead end, no matter how short, players will specifically go down it and expect to find an item at the end. Try to avoid making these unless you plan on putting in just that!
A rule of thumb for firered is that if every geographical feature looks like a set of rectangles, you're on the right track. Grass is no exception! It feels unnatural, but retro, and really clean.
Patches of grass in Emerald are made up of blobs and curves, and the grass loops round and tries to look as much like an ellipse as possible.
Then there's the classic romhack look (TM), which looks quirky and unique, and a little bit like TV intererence. The empty squares in the middle of this grassy patch tell me there are hidden items to be found here, more than anything.
The path on the ground is actually more important than it looks! it's telling you where to go to progress. You should pretty much always put a path on the floor, they drag anyone playing the game onto the right track. They also show you which path is a secret side-quest to get an item and which path is important to carry on the plot. This gives you the information to choose between them, so you don't feel cheated by winding up on the wrong one.
Paths are also important because they break up clear empty space. If ever my screen is virtually filled with the same tile, it's time to remake the route.
Firered again looks a lot like an international rectangle festival but man does it look artsy. Turning everything into a solid straight line again does the trick
Emerald has a lovely little path down the right hand side that clearly contains an item somewhere within it. When I 'm surfing and hit a little niche crack like this one, I'll expect an item not to be too far away! The river is made up of steady curves, but it's rare that two corner tiles wind up next to each other on rivers. The curve on the water's edge is really made up of 2x2 blocks!
The first thing you will do with your coastline in a rom hack is make it waay too complex! Look at all those corner tiles. There's also these random 1x1 tiles dotted everywhere that you inevitably surf into, land on, find nothing, and have to surf off again! The right hand edge of the river as a repeating pattern down it which just looks nasty! rivers that are thinner than 2 blocks in width look bad if you try to put corners in them.
If you ever put in a small cutaway that leads to a dead end, no matter how short, players will specifically go down it and expect to find an item at the end. Try to avoid making these unless you plan on putting in just that!
