As I understand, this is how mountains currently work in the map:
Small and large sprites for mountains, offset sort of randomly for each tile. This isn't bad, when zoomed in, but looks very repetitive, and creates an unfortunate pattern at world scale. It's just not what mountains really look like, more of an idea of what a mountain *should* look like.
Here's something that might help:
Though maybe not possible, it would be a great help if there were a couple multi-tile sprites that combine into bigger, but fewer, mountains. If there are 2 aligned small mountains, they can pick a random sprite from 3 or 4 available ones. This wouldn't alleviate the issue completely, but would look markedly better.
Additionally, better coloration would go a long way - Real mountains are very rarely completely grey; They're usually covered in forest up to a certain level at least, with the highest tips often being frosted by snow. Maybe there could be a green version, a desert version, and an icy version, or the color could pick from surrounding biomes or heat level, I don't know.
This still doesn't look too much like real mountains, however.
Getting something to accurately look like this would be nearly impossible; the closest I was able toget with a mixture of tiles and sprites was this:
Which looks like something, but not exactly amazing.
So I'd suggest maybe a more abstract but more readable approach:
Using graphics that mimic a heightmap would be recognizable as mountains, and avoid the pitfalls of most other approaches. It'd also cement the mountains as part of the terrain, not features stuck on top of it like trees or villages.
Sorry, that's just my 2 cents, haha. Greetings from Austria! Thanks to the team for their hard work!
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Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 461700 times)