scenes from a past best-forgotten (Patreon)

oi, this is embarassing. but i did say i was going to do this, and i suppose getting over that makes it all the more important...

i mentioned previously that my main base for what sugiline cave would be was from an area in a game i worked on when i was ~14. in many ways that project was bumbling and not really worth talking about, but it was a learning experience that enabled me  to make reborn better, and i don't mind breaking it into pieces and taking some of the better ones. conceptually, at least.

the area below was basically a generic desert cave, sort of.

,,,honestly this sand texture is a lot better than reborn's but i guess that's 3rd-gen style for you. sigh. anyway. the screen is a bit darker/slight blue tint because unlike RMXP, RPG Maker 2003 (which is what this was made in) didn't have a way to turn off the layer dimming. 

key things i observe: plants are tinted with the sand colors (this could have just as well been because Rm2k3 enforced tile sets to hold to 256 total colors-- but I don't think I was near the limit on this one). The grass fades in just by having bits cut out from the sides inward. I don't think either of these things work badly. It gives me a frame of reference when making Sugiline's graphics-- although since Reborn's (or rather, RSE's) grass texture is also less detailed than this one that technique might not even work. I think maybe I can compensate with an intermediary autotile. We'll see. 

i also find it interesting that as you can see in this one and the above. i used two different sand colors here just like i eventually decided on doing with tourmaline. i didn't remember doing this in the past but i guess it works. in this case i use it for negative space behind the cliff and in low spaces just like i was doing on tourmaline. although here i also use it to show light shining in through the cave ceiling... that won't be happening. still, i'd totally forgotten about this lol.

rolling cliffs break up the desert cave rooms. this is something i'll need to do a lot in sugiline but... look at this.

it's a messy cliff pattern but this is how cliffs in games are supposed to work. >~<
there is -no- way i could that narrow path through the center effectively in a 3rd-gen mapping style because of how pokemon's cliff structure layers out the sides. it's incredibly tedious and limiting-- in fact you can see in the events there the player was able to walk both behind and on top of that cliff section. the mapping style shown above is much more common and provides much more control and i'm going to stop here before i overdose on salt.

..nevertheless, these kind of cliff divides are part of what i'll need to go for, so you can compare and contrast suigiline, when it's finished, to these screens.

anyway, this is the visual tone i'll be shooting for. more on sugiline to come-- i've already sketched it out and it's a bit bigger than i was intending but it'll be awesome......... that's a pattern, isn't it?