HILLS

Have you ever used one of those tilesets that do not offer enough to keep a map interesting? Perhaps you only have grass and one or two trees, which I can assure you will make a less than satisfactory map overall. Well, now you don’t have to worry as I am going to provide you with a simple, easy to understand tutorial on how to improve the standard and originality of your project without actually needing any graphical abilities. All it really involves is brightening and darkening, so there won’t actually be any real pixel art work involved. Here’s what the result should look like in a game (The raised and lowered snow mounds):

As you can see, they are just an extra to what would otherwise have been plain, boring snow or perhaps even more grass. Both would become repetitive.

And here is one I made earlier to be shown as the final product:

The hill does not have to be as steep as this, so it works fine for whether you want relatively flat land or if you want the area to have plenty of mounds.

My tutorial here will be using Paint Shop Pro 8, which I find is the most suitable for me when creating pixel art. However, I’m sure that this process is just as easy with alternatives like Idraw, which I know is also a popular program amongst RMers. This will focus on auto-arranging tiles, so make sure you have some space.

The first step in this extraordinarily simple process is to open up the tileset that you want to spice up. I have chosen Theodore’s Forest tileset:

As you can see, there is a lot of space available here that could be filled up with pretty much anything. However, as this tutorial is aimed that those who cannot do their own graphics, most of this space won’t be affected.

 

The hill in this tutorial will be made as an auto-tile. These are tiles that extend and arrange when placed together, on most chipsets, dirt/mud/long grass are all prime examples, as they are here.

The auto-tiles are highlighted here. The red represents where the edge of the entire auto-tile is and the blue separates the tiles that we will be working with.

 

On this tileset there are three auto-tile spots available, two of which will be used. Your hill/trench can work on grass, sand, snow, etc. so, even though this tutorial uses grass, you can adopt the same for others, for example sand dunes work in the same way. Select the grass auto-tile from this tileset (If there is no main terrain auto-tile, use the grass/dirt/sand lower layer tile) like so:

Copy this and paste it as a new selection onto the tileset, which will then fit nicely into a free auto-arrange tile area.

After this, add grid lines of 16 by 16 pixels (Pictured below), as this is the size of each RM2K tile (If you are planning to do this for RMXP, then it would be 32 by 32). The bottom nine tiles are the ones that we will be working on first, as they set they layout for the basic hill shape.

 

Before making any alterations to the grass, we will need to make sure that we have enough colours available. Therefore increase the colour depth to 16 million colours before the next step.

Following this, use the “freehand selection tool” to select an area as shown below. This will set out half of the basic shape of the hill you want make. I’ve always preferred graphics that curve in the corners so that the maps appear less square. However, some others favour the squared style, ala Refmap material. Make your selection lines look similar, so if the outside line curves, so does the inside line.

 

 

After this, select the “Adjust Brightness/Contrast” tool as we want to give the hill a darker gradient for this side of the hill. As we are making a hill (Instead of a trench), this area will probably be darker as the light source would not reach it as easily. In my experience, on the majority of chipsets the light is coming from the left. Depending upon the style you have chosen*, decrease the brightness of the selected area. For mine, I went –6 brightness, 0 contrast change. I’d say about –13 is the maximum change, but I haven’t tried it with the absolute cartoon-styled graphics. The deeper edges of the hill will be darker than the higher edges, so we’re going to apply a gradual gradient to the sides.

* - Theodore’s style, which has a very realistic approach, would need very subtle shades when decreasing brightness. If the graphics are cartoonier, then the contrast and brightness change would be more significant. Take note of this when using different styles.

You should end up with the selected area being a bit darker than the rest of the piece. It may not look like a huge change, like so:

 

This won’t look dark enough of course, but this is just leading up to the neat blend of shades to make it fit. The next step is to once again use the “freehand selection tool”. However, this time you hold Ctrl whilst using it, as this will be then taken off the current selection. You then use this to cut down the size of the selected area. In this step, take of a small amount from the inner edges of the selected areas.

 

 

You should end up with something like this:

The process starts to repeat itself at this point. You now decrease the brightness of this selected area by the same amount as that which you used before, unless you think it looks better with something else, of course).

It should be starting to look darker now. Repeat this step (By reducing the selected area and then decreasing the brightness) until you get rid of it all. You can also cut off part of the selected area from the other edges as well, although this should be far more gradual. Don’t worry if you can’t see where this is going, it does look rather peculiar at the moment. You should end up with something similar to this:

 

Now it is time for the brighter side of the hill. This follows the same usual method; select an area using the freehand selection and then brighten it each time. First, select an area that you find suitable, like so:

After this, increase the brightness by 6 (Or your own value) to give this side of the hill a positive gradient, then using Ctrl + Freehand selection to reduce the area and once again increase the brightness by that value. Repeat this until the selection has disappeared. For this selection, it should get brighter the closer to the middle it becomes.

 

 

 

It’s getting a little brighter here.

Here is the next step, on the left, the middle area of the hill. It should be slightly brighter than it is currently, so increase it’s brightness by about 6-12 also. You should end up with something like the image to the right.

 

This should be the finished product of the first section. There are two other pieces to do before it is complete, which are continued on page 2.