Castle Paradox

[Newbie_Power]

This time: Maptiles.

First, here are my worse maptiles. As you can see, it is a house of some kind, and it was only supposed to be used for one scene that, after revising the backstory of my storyline, may no longer exist anymore. This tileset is just for looks, and that isn't its strongpoint at all.

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/2637/housetilesmr3.png
http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/2020/housetilesetjv4.png

Now here is my better looking tileset, but it is also extremely inefficient. Look how some tiles are poorly placed together, wasteful, and require an animation for the sky. I thought I could create a more surreal atmosphere with a pulsating sky, but it did not work well, and it only led to a huge waste of tiles that could have went to things such as sky decorations and some sort of crystal-esque mountains (there's an idea. *jots it down*) and town icons. This tileset would have been much easier had I been smarter in its early stages and knew about Ctrl + T.

http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9610/grasstileswq3.png
http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/7851/grasstilessetbo0.png

[Valigarmander]

That Ctrl+T feature is such a bitch.

Anywho, your graphics look great, I don't see what's wrong with the house set. The second one looks a bit inefficient, but I like the colors.

[Blue Pixel]

the bottom ones are nice. simple, but nice none the less.
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[TwinHamster]

You know, MS-Paint also has a relatively simple transparency system.
With the transparency from Paint, you can transfer large blocks of tiles to, say, a patch of grass tiles.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not.

[Valigarmander]

I'm well aware of MS Paint's transparency capabilities too, but I still refrain from using it because it's such a pain in the ass. All the importing, and the exporting... I just use the Ctrl+T thing, if I can even remember it. So, yeah. In case you wanted my opinion.

[Fenrir-Lunaris]

[REDROGUEXIII]

Nice, for the house you could add a bit more detail for the wall like a clock or something and possibly create more varity in the grass, but good overall.

[TwinHamster]

[Newbie_Power]

[Valigarmander]

[Iblis]

First screenshot (house): Most of it has very low contrast and thus is not interesting to look at. There's a lot of brown, and it's all around the same shades of brown. Number one thing you need to do: vary the colors. If you made the floor gray for example, the map would be many times better already. Varying the colors within a tile would also be very helpful. You seem to always go from dark brown to light brown, staying within the same line on the palette, but this isn't how it has to be. Often it looks more interested if an object is shaded with a desaturated (more gray) color and highlighted with a more saturated (bright, colorful) color. So a brown wall might go from dark gray to medium brown to orange or yellow for the highlights. It can be hard to do right, but when you do it right it adds a lot of depth to maptiles.

It would also be helpful to vary the shades. Let's say you couldn't bear to give this house a stone floor and needed to have it all brown, well, just make the walls a light brown and the floor a dark brown (maybe vice-versa, but I think this way is better). This is kind of already happening, but not enough to really make any difference. Also problematic in terms of contrast is that the majority of the picture is pretty low contrast until you get to these extremely light blue beds. They really clash with the rest of the image and if there were more contrast elsewhere they would look a lot better.

Aside from contrast, the map is very griddy. You have these huge gaps around each floor tile which is really unnecessary. If it were a continuous pattern it would look a lot better. Also the doorway looks odd, when I first saw the image I thought it was a wall and not an entryway. I'm not sure what you can do to fix this aside from removing the overhead part of it and just making it open, but that would look less interesting I think. Lastly the walls are too thin, they need to be more than a few pixels thick.

Second screenshot (the blue one): I can tell that when you constructed the tiles for that land bridge in the middle, you took one and just mirrored it to get the other. Never do this. I know it makes making borders a lot easier, but it looks horrible, especially when the tiles are right next to eachother. I can see that the pattern in the grass is symmetrical between those two tiles and that looks very bad.

The colors you're working with here are interesting, but the flowers might be too bright to go with everything else here. Either add in some other bright elements or tone down the flowers so that it works better as a whole. Since you're using so much blue here, and that's working pretty well, I would actually recommend toning down the flowers over brightening other things.
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Locked
OHR Piano

[Newbie_Power]

Finally! Somebody actually figured out why my maptiles don't look good.