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I've been putting together this tileset and I'd like to get some feedback. Please be honest; it's better to face the harsh criticism early than before I'm committed.

The sample scene shown here is for a Castlevania-inspired game.
I'm anticipating the game to use CHR-ROM, so I am trying to fit all the relevant tiles into groups of 64 tiles. (What is the official term for those groups? I've been calling them "pages.")
This tileset currently has a whole unused page that could be used for any other elements I want to add to the level, including ones specific to just one area. Likewise I also have a whole palette that is unused that can be used by any special tiles in the last page. I kept the sky using just one color as I might want to add some water, and it could use the same palette.




This sample image also shows two different variations for how I could set up the stairs. I may just be nit-picking but I'd appreciate any honest feedback about which looks better. (Edit: The stairs themselves are exactly the same, but where they connect to the ground is different. One is 8 pixels back.)

The trees look great, except their trunks are slightly dark.

Ground, good.

Stairs, I would redo them. Why not use the brown from the tree trunks, and make wooden steps?

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I really like the majority of it, especially the green trees. Those look really good, I think.

The one part that i don't like are the black trees in the background. I just feel that the pattern is overly repetitious. Not as good as the rest.

Rocks are pretty good, but look a little too repetitious also. Try drawing over some of the grid lines. See if you can hide the grid, at least somewhat.

For the stair variations, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. They look almost exactly the same except for the top tile. I have no preference, if I'm looking at it properly.

Have you thought about using one of those CHR "pages" for animated tiles? Water or something of that nature? A lot of games did that.

Noted, noted, noted, and noted. Keep 'em coming! And feel free to bring up things others have mentioned; otherwise I just think one person thought that.


I intentionally made them look blocky. I know it's not conventional, but does it actually look bad? Innapropriate? (whatever)?


Oh right, only the top/alignment is different. I've edited my first post to mention this.


I have, actually! Animated water, maybe a rainy area... But right now I'm working out the base tiles.

I personally wouldn't call it unconventional. With the hardware, it's tough to do anything else. Most game will show a lot of repetition in the rocks, but i think the big issue with yours, for me, is that the actual tile borders are defined in your rocks, for most of the edges.


If you do this, you'll have to swap out a section of at least 1KB to animate the water, so consider filling the rest of the blocks with other tiles that could animate with the same number of frames. SMB2 is a good example of this.

The art looks good, but I can't help thinking that you dedicated waaay too many tiles to trees. Almost half of the tile budget is spent on trees, a repetitive background element that the player doesn't even interact with. As for the things that the player does interact with, you only have the ground (which is substantially less detailed than the trees, since the rocks don't ever cross the metatile boundaries), the stairs, and a few floating platforms. You only have one page/bank left to draw everything else that could make the map more interesting, like mountains, clouds, bridges, waterfalls, water, hazards (spikes, fire, etc.)... not to mention items that the player can destroy/collect.

Since these trees are cones, you could probably reuse the sides of the lower sections in the upper sections, as they get progressively closer. Some of the center could certainly repeat vertically as well. Sure they would look less detailed, but they're trees, so they already look repetitive by default. Better save the tiles for foreground stuff that's likely to draw more attention from the player.

Looking at the screenshot a third time, the trees way in the back (top) look really silly for some reason.

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I'd say it looks awesome. I'm no specialist though.

The problem with the trees at the top is that their silhouette makes it look like small things on top of some solid block. Having their bottoms blend better together so it looks like they're actually part of it would help solve the issue.

As for stairs: I'd say, take the top variant, then make the tile to the right (i.e. the first one immediately above the stairs) thin. That way you're marking more clearly which part you can go through.

The rocks could be a little more detailed. You could probably replace the darkest shade of brown with black, and add a light brown highlight for the rocks. You can add some dithering to the rocks too.

I thought I'd try and improve the tree:

Dang. You, sir*, are very talented.
If I had money, I would strongly consider hiring you to help me with my art.

*Or madam, I don't know you.

I think the grid-like ground rock tiles look fine. It's an aesthetic, it's not necessarily right or wrong, but it definitely doesn't look bad to me. The floating platforms, I think you should darken the bottom halves (the stalactite-like part) to better match what the ground tiles look like.

As for the background, I wish I had the example still with me, but you can draw the negative space between trees and use that to decorate the black part, as though the trees were all black and you were drawing the ambient lighting that comes from behind the trees. I just drew a quick sketch of what I mean; with a layer of shading, this can look really good, and those blue vertical lines can be repeated a bunch to look like a bunch of tree trunks with spaces between them, even if the rest of the tree is just a solid black.

Edit: I'm not saying to ditch the trees you have, I'm just offering an alternative thing you can try if you want to jazz the BG up a little more.

Here's my attempt at taking Espozo's tree and reducing the number of tiles as tokumaru suggested, and a PyxelEdit file for said tree.




Edit: Made a couple edits and uploaded file. I wanted to play with this tileset in the new NiGo-CHR but I was having trouble getting it imported.

I was bored again, so I made the tops of the trees in the background different:


I don't think I used too many tiles either. I think it was about 16. I actually made it to where it never dipped below the trees, because I thought it would be cool to use parallax scrolling there.