ESBY'S PROFILE

anybody seen any picnickers round here? i need to know for, uhhhhhh, research
also, please dont play with matches in forests

author=LockeZ
Can I be the new admin?

look at this loser, doesn't even have his own gimmick

q.@.p

situations like this is why i should be in charge

didn't you create life

author=LockeZ
Your grasp on lighting is really good, it makes this map stand out compared to other RTP games. The size and density of the map is also really good. Your mapping is solid overall; any suggestions are going to be nitpicks, mine included.

I can't say I agree with this, the map has some pretty glaring issues that should be addressed and to say that any further suggestions on how to improve it are nitpicks is not good advice.

First off, for me anyway, the map is huge and looking at the bedroom it must extend at least another 5 or 6 tiles down - I'd really look at reducing the overall size (especially vertically) as it looks like you've created the rooms around the decorations and not the other way round. You can save some space by moving the whole right hand side across by two tiles to get rid of that weird gap thing in the middle of the building and the bedroom/dining room can easily be shrunk by another two tiles. Since you're parallaxing the bedroom could easily be move a tile up, probably even two.

The second area I'd look at improving is the layout - the bedroom being an enclave in the middle of the building makes no sense (wouldn't you want natural light?), a way of fixing this would be to put it on the right hand side of the building and having a more central hallway. Why is there a doorway on the left hand side but not one over on the left, try to be a little more consistent with how you separate rooms.

Thirdly, tile choice and usage. The carpeting still doesn't make much sense. I see a lot of needless repetition of the same or similar tiles with bedroom having two tables above two cupboards when one of each would create the same effect and allow you to shrink the room further, the dining room has the same two cupboards next to each other along with the top half of a cupboard tile being used as a table or something. There's boxes and wheat all over the place despite there being plenty room below the kitchen for storage. Unless there's a reason for it I'd never use one floor and wall tile throughout the whole home, use different tiles to create identifiable spaces (stone flooring in the kitchen, wallpaper and carpet in the bedroom etc). If you want to use sideways doors in your homes then you're going to have to change the ceiling tiles you use, it's really difficult to create the effect with the blocky RTP tiles, you'll need to create an edit for the ones with the thin border (I'll post an example).

And finally, the lighting. It's inconsistent near the windows, why does the furniture in the dining room create shadows but the kitchen counter doesn't? Is the house detached, why is it then that there's only windows on one wall of the house?

So yeah, "nitpicks".


I'll break down how I tend to do interiors. I take it to the extreme by having the interior size be 1:1 with the exterior size but I'd say that the first step for interiors is to just put down a floor that matches the shape of the building from the outside and then look at how you can carve out that space into rooms with a believable layout. Then decide which room goes where and rework the position of walls/doors if need be. The final step is to then decorate the rooms, I try to keep things as simple as possible and only put in as much as necessary to have the rooms be identifiable.

Hope this all helps, Nevermore ^^