All aboard for Tourmaline (Patreon)

i spent a bit of time last night making new tiles for the desert
thought i'd share

 side-facing trains (that are frankly way-overdue), cacti and a palm tree:
http://image.prntscr.com/image/ff74e3a47a7a4beb9f3845f64f10c080.png
note the palm tree is segmented so i can vary its height easily

abandoned train platform/sign:
http://image.prntscr.com/image/d1911f68839748ce9b298df29deaceda.png

finally i spent quite some time on the sand tiles. in RPGs, and especially 2d RPGs, deserts are often sort of dinky areas that are narrowly closed in with cliffs. i want tourmaline to be different. i want it to be open, wide, something the player will get lost in not because of winding paths but because there's just fucking nothing in the huge expanse to go off of. 

however, 'fucking nothing' does not really make for interesting maps. so for a bit of inspiration i looked at the one game that i knew did desert exploration right-- Journey. 

i have not played it myself but having watched a bit of it before i know that it treats deserts how they were meant to be treated. it's vast, you're wandering, you don't know where you'll find what you're looking for but hey let's see if that figure on the horizon is anything. best of all despite being in EmptyDesertLand for half the time, it's still a visually stunning game. and how?

dunes. the sand is beautiful, you can climb up it, go around it, fall down over it-- all because it is not just a flat floor of sand like in most games. that's all well and good for a 3d game, but how about a 2d? mapping dunes is a bit precarious because there is no depth, and everything is to a grid. 

my first attempt at giving depth to sand--
http://image.prntscr.com/image/e0a4e340b25c4d559bacc10668953003.png
it doesn't look bad but it doesn't flow well with an otherwise flat ground. it's small and dinky and won't tile well either. 

attempt #2:
http://image.prntscr.com/image/10a557f93df1405eaba05cab38680c3b.png
not so bad. it still doesn't really play well with flat ground, but it can be tiled. the grid lines are here:
http://image.prntscr.com/image/5083c52a824d4fd5bd50809438766b80.png
i have two levels in this basically, sloping half way up, sloping the second half up, both levels down, and then level at the top, level half way up. it is a major pain, but it does not work.

still, i was not quite satisfied. third time is the charm:
http://image.prntscr.com/image/2d26c145cf4749d2bcd6161178755521.png
here i used the same tile shape from the previous attempt, but then i put it on a gradient tile base. by making the base ground into a gradient, it gives it depth and shadow to the sand at all points. unfortunately i had to replicate the outline of the dune for each shade of sand, and for what shade it would be against on the back side. although that is tedious (and will be hot hell to map with), I think it ends up looking pretty cool.

Here is the test I did with it in the tileset itself (just copy/pasting pieces as if i were mapping; not an actual map segment)
http://image.prntscr.com/image/2546649182e14f65bddfda4a73130433.png

there are still a few changes i need to this, but i am pretty confident that i can make these rolling dunes look interesting for a large area, especially with the different shades of them. it means mapping tourmaline is going to be a royal pain-- but in the end, i think it'll be worth it. 

how about you?