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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperDesignThe Design of Random Tiles/Aesthetics
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LucasMaxBros
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« on: October 20, 2015, 07:02:25 PM »

I want other peoples perspective and experience on this subject. When you're making a game and you have a level or world that the player is going through, how do you lay out art assets like bushes, tall grass, flowers, or other un-interactive(for the most part)assets? Most of the time, when I lay down tiles I'll do it to indicate where something is or to go with the levels design. But when you have a part that just seems bare, how do you spruce it up?

Do you just put assets where it feels natural? Do you randomly do it until you think it looks right? Repetition? Specific patterns?

Here's an example:

In this image of Super Metroid, look at the flowers and plants on the ground. If you had to make another room with this tileset that was a flat hallway for the most part, how would YOU lay out those flowers?

I don't hear much discussion on subjects like this, so give your thoughts!
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baconman
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« Reply #1 on: October 23, 2015, 10:43:44 AM »

Probabalistic randomness. You see the general brush that's taking a good chunk of that space? 80% chance that will appear. See the couple of short buds? Maybe a 10% chance those will appear, but if it overlaps with the brush, it replaces it. Then in a different kind of randomness, see the taller ones? hallway width / 15 of those *will* appear somewhere, and they'll overlap either of the other two.

Apart from that, the tileset is mainly just "tops" (where ground would be an effect) and "bottoms" (anything that isn't a top).

Tangent: After playing DKC2, I still expect the spiky bramble of the ceiling to be damaging, and I'm still surprised when I remember it isn't.
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valrus
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« Reply #2 on: October 24, 2015, 06:58:04 AM »

I just do it randomly, too.

The tiles I lay out are pretty samey, and then after the tilemap loads it's treated as a simple probabilistic cellular automaton.  The automaton does things like choose appropriate border tiles at ground/background boundaries and randomly switch some subset of tiles with visual variants of them.  Rules like "if you and all your neighbors are basic basic background in this generation, you have a 20% chance of becoming one of these special tiles in the next generation" or "if you're special background and you have an identical neighbor, you have a 30% chance of becoming basic".
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Hipshot
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« Reply #3 on: November 22, 2015, 03:00:28 PM »

Setting aside the programmed randomness in a game/editor/engine, it's very much based on the skill of the level designer/environmental artist to be able to handle vast void spaces which might look boring and transform them (if needed(!)) into something more interesting to the eye.

I myself kinda work in segmented randomness if one can say that, where I would make a base, a basic tileset and then scatter small and larger details in some places more than others, so it won't look too even and "generated".


Here's a scene with an obelisk and a few items, just sitting out in the vast desert, one tileset, that consists of 3 images, completely random. What I do then is that I add a bunch of stones, some dried up grass and dunes, combined with a more blank desert tile, one should also know, that the small stones have 7 variations to them, one being "no stone" so, even if they are manually placed on the ground, they might not show up or might create what looks like, very random but still organized patterns.



If I were to zoom this image out, you might find that this pattern with the dunes probably don't repeat, some ares might be very low populated with stones and dunes and some might be more dense.

Here's another example, but more focused on a smaller area, all the lupines you see here are like the small stones in the previous image, they have a few variations and one is "nothing", what I've done is that I placed tons of them by the corner to give out the feeling that "for some reason there are just more flowers here", there really is not reason, except for making the player think that.




To answer your question about the scene you posted, if I can do nothing else but to rearrange, I would (if the engine allowed me) move some of the flowers to the foreground, so that the player walks behind them sometimes.
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