Castle Paradox

[fungo]

walkabouts, tiles, anything helps.

[Gizmog1]

Look at existing graphics, and emulate them. Don't trace over them, but look at them, try and figure out how they were made, and then go to a different window, and try to recreate what you saw. There's a variety of tutorials on the subject, and there used to a be a post here that had a link to some good ones. The trick to it is, practice as much as you can. I practiced on again, off again for a year or two, and I'm finally to a point where I'm content with the graphics I can produce, and sometimes I'm amazed when what I can draw what it was I was thinking of.

[jabbercat]

Giz gave some top advice (amazingly ). If you take an exsisting sprite, and make sure it is an awesomeone at that, just copy it, pixel for pxel, by hand. It does help things improve alot.
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Moogle no longer owes prizes.

[Gizmog1]

Also, I'd say watch a lot of porn. IT helps keep me motivated you know? But that's neither really here nor there.

[Rimudora]

Read Tsugumo's tutorial.

http://www.zoggles.co.uk/asp/tutorials.asp?tut=17

[fungo]

that was pretty good. however, the kind of thing I'm looking for is really specific tutorials, like a "HOW TO DO CASTLE TILES", or a "HOW TO CREATE COMBAT SPRITES" tutorial.

[LeRoy_Leo]

It could be fun to make one of these tutorials myself just for practice. Heaven forbid I ever release one, though. >.<

How to draw castle tiles.
How to draw battle sprites.
Another idea I had was a How to arrange your map tiles effectively.
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "

[jabbercat]

I'd read them!
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Moogle no longer owes prizes.

[Rimudora]

[Mike Caron]

This is so totally off topic, but, by seeing you link to Fenrir's Sprite Domain, I feel happy. Know why? Because it's me that rescued him from Geocities "hosting".

Also, plz don't hotlink images, it eats my rather expensive bandwidth, kthx.
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[Rimudora]

Just be glad I didn't use an [IMG] tag >:(

[LeRoy_Leo]

Is the [IMG] tag suddenly that bad?
_________________
Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "

[Inferior Minion]

[Gizmog1]

You're not going to find too many tutorials that are going to take you that far under their wing, but I'll do my best to help you out. Let's take Castle tiles for an example.

First, figure out what kind of a Castle you're making. An Ogre's Fortress is going to be a heck of a lot uglier and more rugged than King Alcindor's castle in the hills. Either way, the exterior is more than likely going to be made out of stone.

If you want to go for the stereotypical castle, that is. There's no reason to necessarily settle for it. Looks can be deceiving. Ali Baba's castle might look like a simple cave on the outside, but it's actually a huge expansive home under the mountain, practically entirely coated with gold! Or maybe your world is more Egyptian, and kings live in Pyramids!

We'll talk more about that later though, for right now, look at some pictures of stone walls. German Castles are usually more elegant, cleanly polished, and uniform in the size of bricks than say, Irish Castles, which tend to be a little rougher around the edges, and worn down by old age and fighting. Along the highways of Lexington, there's some particularly gorgeous stonewalls that were put up by slaves a hundred years or so ago, that are still standing today, without any mortar or adhesives used to hold the rocks together, and in Ireland, there's entire castles built the same way. Look up pictures of the Pyramids, and the Great Wall of China. Hell, run down to the 7-11, take a gander at what we're doing today.

Be sure to read the link to Tsugumo's tutorial from above, he did a pretty good bit on bricks himself.

Notice how in Chapter 4, the bricks aren't lined up all at once? They're staggered, so that at the seam where two bricks in the first row meet, there's a brick exactly in the middle? It kind of makes the shape you'd see if you rolled a 5 on a dice? There's at least two good reasons for that. 1, it makes the tile more visually interesting, by there not being just a straight line of dark gray all the way up.

Secondly, it's more architecturally sound. If you were to actually build a wall with all the bricks exactly lined up in a row vertically, and you put weight on the top brick, you'd be transferring all that weight right down to the bottom brick, plus the weight of all the bricks above it. That puts a lot of force on that brick, which makes it crack, and lessens it's integrity, and your wall would eventually come down. By offsetting them a bit, if you put weight on the top brick, you're putting weight on two bricks beneath it, which in turn are putting weight on two bricks each, and so on until the weight's been pretty evenly distributed down to the bottom.

Do you have to do it like we do it in real life? Hell no. Chances are, no one's going to know, and if they do know, they won't care. You can pile the bricks up vertically, make them into little arches like a giant game of Jenga, or anything you want. That goes for more than just bricks, too. You can do anything you want, so long as it's either fun, looks good, or gets your point across, and usually get away with it. (That's called "Suspended Disbelief", and you can find out more about that at your local library)

Anyway, let's quit talking about bricks, and start drawing bricks. If you're making a refined, plainish brick wall, Tsug's tutorial is a pretty good guideline. Just draw rectangles, make them off set from each other a bit maybe, draw some lines between them, and then shade the rectangles. Easy enough. If you're making a less refined wall, vary the size of the bricks. Maybe they're not using bricks at all, but rather whatever rocks they can find, at which point you'd do mostly the same thing, only adding rounder or wilder shaped stones in place of bricks.

Also keep in mind, a castle is pretty big. If you use a million teeny bricks to make your castle, it's not going to look as impressive as if you'd used some that are slightly larger. The player might not even see all of a Pyramid type castle, and only see a few huge house sized bricks that they can enter. Figaro castle is almost a perfect example of the right sized castle having the right sized bricks. If they were any smaller, it'd be almost too much for you to take in, and there wouldn't be enough detail. If they were any bigger, it'd look old fashioned and clumsy.

I'll give some more advice later, but if you want an easy way to do like, towers or spires, or things with bricks that curve, find a drinking glass with that kind of a texture to it. Clear would be preferable, as then you could put construction paper of whatever color you want your castle to be inside, and you have an easy reference. Just draw and shade like you see on the cup, and you'll be a-okay. But right now I'm taking a nap, and maybe when I get up I'll draw some of this stuff and see if I can narrow it down any further. Halloween No Ingles has some public domain stone basement tiles, and bricks, if you don't mind venturing into a game with swearing, sex and nudity to get at 'em.

(Just a thought, but if everybody posted whatever advice they had, and maybe showed an example of their work through various stages (Possibly with permission for someone to use them and alter them to learn, but that would be optional) , or asked for help with something they were having trouble with, and we all pitched in, together we could have a pretty fullscale tutorial for anything and everything in almost no time.)

[Mike Caron]