I NEED TO LEAVE devlog: Learning Parallax mapping and creating the house (Patreon)

Hi everyone! It's been a long week, and you may have noticed I haven't been super active on socials. This is mostly because I've been obsessively working on this game.

One of the big challenges has been implementing my own art into the map. I can do this two ways in RPG maker, either through a custom tileset, or through parallax mapping. I've opted for parallax mapping because I can make the map a lot more organic as opposed to everything being restricted into 48x48 px squares.

This means I am imposing a hand drawn map over a map that's already been made in RPG maker (kind of like a filter the player character walks over). This sounded easy from what I could understand, and I know artists like Plastiboo had done this in their rpg maker game, but in reality figuring out how to do this was really difficult.

There is very little information on how to parallax map that is up to date for RPG maker MV. I spent most of the week experimenting, watching youtube tutorials, trying different plug ins, and failing consistently. I was honestly thinking of giving up on the idea and going through the grueling process of creating custom tilesets to use.

Thankfully I had a breakthrough about two days ago!  After trying 5 different plugins and scouring ancient rpg maker forum posts, I found out that the feature was built into the newest version of the program by simply adding the image file to the correct folder and changing how the file was named. It felt like a huge breakthrough, and now I have a really solid grasp on how to create all the assets necessary to create the house.

The pictures attached are the designs for the two floors of the house. Today I am trying to actually draw the entire first floor and basement. The pixels are a lot smaller than I am used to, but I am trying to preserve my red, black, and white motif without sacrificing detail.

The video I attached is the culmination of what I've learned! I'm excited to share more of this process. Let me know what you guys think- I'm looking for any comments, criticism, etc.