2d RPG games environement , how its made ?

hypnos

hello guys
this type of environements :

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i always had a 3D aproach to video games ...polygons,3d meshes,shaders..
but when it comes to classic 2D games i almost get lost ..
i know that this games are made with pixel not polygons.
but i still dont understand the workflow ,how the level is made ..
how they apply collision.. how they make those texture pattern/tiles..

im sure there are many people in polycount who can explain this workflow to me thanks !

PogoP

Most 2d games like Metroid/Chrono Trigger etc on the Snes and those older consoles tended to use tilesets afaik. Basically just modular sections that get placed down and they are either set to 'collidable' or not. Then the characters are animated sprites on a different layer. You also have the background as it's own separate layer which scrolls at a different rate to the rest of the level usually to create a parallax effect.

You can actually get tileset editors, might wanna try out some of those. Here's a couple of examples:

http://pyxeledit.com/

http://www.pickleeditor.com/

Justin Meisse

What's the deal with the RPG menu on top of Braid?

Here's a cool blog post about building levels in Braid, it's a good look into the production of modern, non tiled 2D games. And here is the rest of the posts about developing the art of Braid.

McGreed

You could take a look at the program RPG Maker, and see how that is working, and since it's mainly aimed at RPG, it might help. There is a trial as well.

When I was studying game design, we were using Game Maker for prototyping our stuff, and you can make a basic game just by drag and drop, but you can also code in it if you want.
Other alternative is Construct 2. Both of them have a free version if you want to try them out. The easiest thing is to just download some of the game that has been made in either editors and look at how they build it up, and there is always a tutorial page with helpful examples.

hypnos

PogoP wrote: »

Most 2d games like Metroid/Chrono Trigger etc on the Snes and those older consoles tended to use tilesets afaik. Basically just modular sections that get placed down and they are either set to 'collidable' or not. Then the characters are animated sprites on a different layer. You also have the background as it's own separate layer which scrolls at a different rate to the rest of the level usually to create a parallax effect.

You can actually get tileset editors, might wanna try out some of those. Here's a couple of examples:

http://pyxeledit.com/

http://www.pickleeditor.com/

thank you for the informations ! ill check those editors

hypnos

Justin Meisse wrote: »

What's the deal with the RPG menu on top of Braid?

Here's a cool blog post about building levels in Braid, it's a good look into the production of modern, non tiled 2D games. And here is the rest of the posts about developing the art of Braid.

Nice ! it will help me alot :poly121:

hypnos

McGreed wrote: »

You could take a look at the program RPG Maker, and see how that is working, and since it's mainly aimed at RPG, it might help. There is a trial as well.

When I was studying game design, we were using Game Maker for prototyping our stuff, and you can make a basic game just by drag and drop, but you can also code in it if you want.
Other alternative is Construct 2. Both of them have a free version if you want to try them out. The easiest thing is to just download some of the game that has been made in either editors and look at how they build it up, and there is always a tutorial page with helpful examples.

I dowloaded a trial version of RPG Maker to test it , didn't experiment alot with it ,but i think its the best choice for me...:poly121:

Isaiah Sherman

Justin Meisse wrote: »

What's the deal with the RPG menu on top of Braid?

Here's a cool blog post about building levels in Braid, it's a good look into the production of modern, non tiled 2D games. And here is the rest of the posts about developing the art of Braid.

Very cool!

Ben Apuna

More pixel art tools here.

A tutorial on how to get started with TIled.

http://opengameart.org/ has some examples you can check out, modify, and even use in your own games. Specifically the Liberated Pixel Cup has a nice RPG base tile set.

hypnos

Ben Apuna wrote: »

More pixel art tools here.

A tutorial on how to get started with TIled.

http://opengameart.org/ has some examples you can check out, modify, and even use in your own games. Specifically the Liberated Pixel Cup has a nice RPG base tile set.

cool ! this is very helpful , thank you
Ben you seem to know pixelart very well ,can you explain few things to me :poly121: ?
-Color depth / bits per pixels
-Resolution , wich reolution to use in pixelart and when ..
-Color palette ...

KellyGracey

awesome, No wonder these game software makers are rich

Neox

Isaiah Sherman wrote: »

Very cool!

I dunno know, braid always looked super tiled to me, despite the tech they used, they still stick with the 90° design most of the times. It always baffles me when new 2d games come out and they still look like this



.........._______
____.....|.......|
....|____|.......|
.................|..........___
.................|_________|


of course there are places you have to stick with the gridpattern gamedesignwise but you can break that look a lot without touching the gamedesign

Justin Meisse

Neox wrote: »

I dunno know, braid always looked super tiled to me, despite the tech they used, they still stick with the 90° design most of the times.

well I'm pretty sure it was a design choice, it is sort of a commentary on Mario saving the princess. I've also heard that collision on sloped surfaces gets tricky.

McGreed

Yeah, collision on any objects which isn't a box, as it has to either do pixel or an alpha check, and is more complicated when trying to calculate, meaning more heavy. Kind like having box for collision for most of your models in UDK, instead of more custom shaped.

hypnos

McGreed wrote: »

Yeah, collision on any objects which isn't a box, as it has to either do pixel or an alpha check, and is more complicated when trying to calculate, meaning more heavy. Kind like having box for collision for most of your models in UDK, instead of more custom shaped.

collision is trickier than i thought...

do you have any idea about this topics :

-Color depth / bits per pixels
-Resolution , wich reolution to use in pixelart and when ..
-Color palette ...

Ben Apuna

hypnos wrote: »

cool ! this is very helpful , thank you
Ben you seem to know pixelart very well ,can you explain few things to me :poly121: ?
-Color depth / bits per pixels
-Resolution , wich reolution to use in pixelart and when ..
-Color palette ...

Sorry for the slow reply.

Color Depth: Technically speaking just create your artwork in a standard 32 bits per pixel ( so 256 colors for each channel Red, Green, Blue, Alpha ) file format, PSD, PNG, TGA, TIFF or whatever you prefer. Most 2D game engines will take PNGs. If you're forced to work with GIFs you'll be stuck with only 256 colors total.

Resolution: This comes down to what your game's display resolution will be and how much detail you want to show onscreen. Also from an amount of work point of view, doubling width & height of pixel art means 4 times the work. So a 32 x 32 tile takes 4 times the amount of work/time to create than a 16 x 16 pixel tile.

Color Palette: Nowadays I don't think there are any technical reasons for using a limited color palette unless you're targeting something like a Nintendo DS ( or older system, I don't know anything about the 3DS... ) which has a proprietary sprite system which supports limited color palettes ( Did I just break a NDA...!? ). I think limited color palette PNGs also compress a bit better ( on disk size, not in memory size ), though what's a few hundred bytes/kilobytes of savings worth these days in the grand scheme of things?

Oh yeah and there's also color cycling, but I don't know of any modern game engines that support that out of the box.

Artistically though you might choose to use a limited palette to give your art a retro look. If we're talking about visual design rules, limited palettes can also help unify your artwork. They can also simplify workflow a bit since you're always picking from the same set of colors.

If you're interested in emulating some retro game systems there are some color palette examples over here: https://code.google.com/p/grafx2/wiki/PaletteRepository

hypnos

Ben Apuna wrote: »

Sorry for the slow reply.

Color Depth: Technically speaking just create your artwork in a standard 32 bits per pixel ( so 256 colors for each channel Red, Green, Blue, Alpha ) file format, PSD, PNG, TGA, TIFF or whatever you prefer. Most 2D game engines will take PNGs. If you're forced to work with GIFs you'll be stuck with only 256 colors total.

Resolution: This comes down to what your game's display resolution will be and how much detail you want to show onscreen. Also from an amount of work point of view, doubling width & height of pixel art means 4 times the work. So a 32 x 32 tile takes 4 times the amount of work/time to create than a 16 x 16 pixel tile.

Color Palette: Nowadays I don't think there are any technical reasons for using a limited color palette unless you're targeting something like a Nintendo DS ( or older system, I don't know anything about the 3DS... ) which has a proprietary sprite system which supports limited color palettes ( Did I just break a NDA...!? ). I think limited color palette PNGs also compress a bit better ( on disk size, not in memory size ), though what's a few hundred bytes/kilobytes of savings worth these days in the grand scheme of things?

Oh yeah and there's also color cycling, but I don't know of any modern game engines that support that out of the box.

Artistically though you might choose to use a limited palette to give your art a retro look. If we're talking about visual design rules, limited palettes can also help unify your artwork. They can also simplify workflow a bit since you're always picking from the same set of colors.

If you're interested in emulating some retro game systems there are some color palette examples over here: https://code.google.com/p/grafx2/wiki/PaletteRepository

like a boss !! ... actually you are a boss :thumbup:
everything ! very well explained thank you Ben

Neox

McGreed wrote: »

Yeah, collision on any objects which isn't a box, as it has to either do pixel or an alpha check, and is more complicated when trying to calculate, meaning more heavy. Kind like having box for collision for most of your models in UDK, instead of more custom shaped.

you can also use polygonal collision, pretty much like you would do with 3d objects, a rough representation works in almost all cases.
We've used that in a couple of 2d unity based projects now, of course it is more expensive than a box but usually with 2d games you don't have to process as much data as with 3d games anyways.

Hoiwever as i'm great at derailing a thread and the question was how to make actually tilebased environments i'm going to step out of this discussion now ^^

hypnos

Neox wrote: »

you can also use polygonal collision, pretty much like you would do with 3d objects, a rough representation works in almost all cases.
We've used that in a couple of 2d unity based projects now, of course it is more expensive than a box but usually with 2d games you don't have to process as much data as with 3d games anyways.

Hoiwever as i'm great at derailing a thread and the question was how to make actually tilebased environments i'm going to step out of this discussion now ^^

well actually the informations that you share with us is valuable, don't hesitate to "derail" this thread with your knowledge