Day 6-
I created another large forestry tilesheet, this time of bare winter trees mixed in with the everygreenery. I'll probably do another of just pure sticks to stamp all over as well.
Sticks and Trees may break my knees.
The bulk of yesterday was spent doing some measurement calculations with my google maps reference image. I divided it up into 11x17 slices, converted them in Tiled first into tilesheets (1 BIG tile each) to stamp individually into their respective tilemaps. The process also included initially taking the pngs the low res png slices and resizing them so that they would cover the right dimensions to cut up into 370x370 8x16 tiles. Thankfully I found FastStone Photo Resizer. (The FREE version is perfect!) Such a Godsend for bulk PNG resizing. To save space I up-scaled the files with only 256 colors. Originally I did 32-bit color, however it created 10mb files and ended up taking up more than half a gb. 256 colors is completely adequate for my purposes. How did I figure out that calculation? Well the day before I legit counted them in the original reference map compared to the drawn on tiles. That sure was a cursed day of math problems.
Want to see all the files I had to convert/create?
Each file here took a few minutes out of my day make. Yes. Each.
The fruits of my labor seem to now be presenting themselves. I now can start the painting grunt work.
I swear it'll get much cleaner soon!
Back to the Map Slices.
As stated in the prior log update, I realized that it was good practice to prioritize which ones I'll work on first then find time for the others. I did this by reviewing the Google Maps reference image and create a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. (I really dig Office 365) In this I labeled each of them by color. Purple is the highest. Dark Red is essential. Red is mostly essential. Orange is desired but not dire. And white is one big shrug.
Minimalist Abstract Art! Come to my art gallery!
The good news? Only 32 essential Tilemaps to paint with just 6 mostly essential ones! :)
The bad news? "Only" 32 essential Tilemaps to paint with "just" 6 mostly essential ones. :/
Somehow I felt like I was extremely unproductive yesterday and yet I review this log and it does actually seem like I made a lot of progress. Perhaps I'm just nervous at how long it's taking? I have to remind myself that it was always going to take longer than my initial expectations. It's the nature of the beast.
OH and I also picked up a few Udemy Unity courses that were on sale! One was a course on 2D game making by the same guys who I bought the 3D one from from. a FPS/Survival game making course with a focus on enemy (zombie) AI creation, and a third one all about creating classic 2D turn-based RPGS which I wanted mostly for the information about inventory/dialog/etc. $200 courses for about $12 each? Udemy got me again!
-Randall