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[punkonjunk]

I have never done this before, but my buddies and I were working on this one project, then I realized "3d is hard I don't know how to 3d and can't contribute much" so I started putting together ideas for an absolutely killer metroidvania. I got an idea for gameplay that is really neat, and then started drawing what I wanted it to look like, assuming I could use it as reference material and direction for an actual artist, then I kept going for six hours and now I like it, and am not sure I drew it. It's possible I channeled a dead person. I don't draw. at all. Except for dicks, I draw dicks a lot.

I also realized almost immediately that paint is not the right tool, but couldn't stop. I have looked at a lot of lists and guides, but before I buy something, I'd really love some current tips based on what is out there right now: I want it to let me store my own tiles ideally, make my own tile or spritesheets and call from those, scale or vector them and then after placing, be able to further edit or change without editing the tilesheet constantly - I drew a lot of pieces, then stitched them here, and I think it looks good. I am hoping for rotation but rotsprite is also really cool, but really I would like the one program that does most of what I need, instead of needing fourty things. I assume most things also have layering for paralax because that is a thing.

Me and my crew have not landed on unity or GMS yet. Unity is more work, but looks like a much, much richer choice. I will be doing the design work for how everything will work, and apparently the music and now probably the art. I am also hoping to avoid "reach edge of screen, transition" and go full seamless area, and I am hoping for an application that reasonably supports that... that'll let me stick large, seamless maps together and look at them or export them to the game so they can have collision drawn on them. (unless I do that?)

EDIT
I also did this:



The dead person I'm channeling seems to like meat and teeth as much as I do.

EDIT AGAIN

So tile studio is confusing. Tiled is less confusing, but not what I want. I've played with a bunch of stuff, but what I'm really looking for is something that lets me store tiles or assets and select them either as tiles of various sizes. I'd also like to be able to FREELY PAINT on the map AFTER placing tiles, and scale them. This doesn't seem crazy - lemmings was built like this, and I can see other folks wanting to build levels from freely scaled and edited assets.
IF NOT though, I'm looking at a lot of scratchpads to draw on and paste from.

Am I looking for something unreasonable? Am I basically looking at "no one does that, do it yourself" sort of thing? 

Here was what the editor for Lemmings DS looked like:
http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/docs/2007/images/editor1.png
I liked that - you had assets on pages of various sizes, and could basically just "paint" with an asset. Like dirt was actually made up of 10 or so different layered dirt "blocks" that could then be layered or erased, etc.
THIS is how I'd like to paint my stuff out, but not so much with just huge areas of draw space all around everything and manually managing assets as separate tiles. Does this exist? Am I just not googling it right?

EDIT:
I got a lot of great tool recommendations here and from correspondence with others. Still love feedback on what I'm drawing though, as I started this barely over a month ago.

[Magurp244]

I think you might be confusing scripting tools and art tools. Typically, the artwork (sprite sheets, tilesets, etc) are separate and provided in a specific format by an artist (jpg, png, bmp, etc). Those are then loaded into a level editor/scripting tool to create the level's the engine loads to play the game. Such editor's are usually specific to a particular engine, or custom built to package the level data for a particular engine. The Lemmings DS editor is an example of a specific and custom build editor for a particular game/engine.

I am also hoping to avoid "reach edge of screen, transition" and go full seamless area, and I am hoping for an application that reasonably supports that... that'll let me stick large, seamless maps together and look at them or export them to the game so they can have collision drawn on them. (unless I do that?)

Things like collision and transitions would be handled by the engine, you would likely need a custom tool for that which could allow you to preview the level before exporting the data. Some available engines might offer such features, not sure.

[Chris MacAdam]

You might want to look into PyxelEdit. http://pyxeledit.com/
You can make tilemaps and tiles in the same editor. It seems like something you might be interested in.
EDIT: you can also paint in the scene after you places tiles down. I find it helps a lot with making art.

[TitoOliveira]

Seems like you got your nomenclatures and expectations all over the place.
Firstly, what do you mean by "make my own tile or spritesheets and call from those, scale or vector them and then after placing, be able to further edit or change without editing the tilesheet constantly"?

The tiles and tilesheets are something the artist will have to provide. There are tools to help with that, but overall this is something that should be done before putting it "into" the engine.
Scaling is one of the most basic functions of any tool that deals with models or images, but vectoring something is really advanced and you can't expect to transform a bitmap into a vector and have the exactly same image. And even so, the only tools capable of doing that are vector softwares, so in the end is just better to start from vector. You have to decide early on if you want to use bitmaps or vectors, because whatever you decide, you'll be creating the art as it from the start, you can't be changing from one to the other. This is a decision that likely you change the art style of the game as well.
Finally, if later on you decide to change something on the tiles and tilesheets, you'll have to go back to the art tool and edit. After you place it in a scene on the engine, it's there, you can't really edit it from the place it is placed.

"I'd also like to be able to FREELY PAINT on the map AFTER placing tiles, "
If i understood you correctly there's no tool like that. You want an "art/level design" software all bundled together and that's just non existent. At least not that i know of. In another words there's usually a very thick line that divides the game tools and the art tools, and no tool that i know of does both like that.

[punkonjunk]

in the absolute simplest way, I'm looking for a tile editor that doesn't require a grid on the world you are placing tiles into, and also supports tiles to place of various sizes.
This does not seem like a strange thing, but it's becoming increasingly clear that this sort of tool simply doesn't exist. I can just open multiple image files and copy and clone and dong with pieces that way, it just seems like something like this would exist.

[TitoOliveira]

in the absolute simplest way, I'm looking for a tile editor that doesn't require a grid on the world you are placing tiles into, and also supports tiles to place of various sizes.
This does not seem like a strange thing, but it's becoming increasingly clear that this sort of tool simply doesn't exist. I can just open multiple image files and copy and clone and dong with pieces that way, it just seems like something like this would exist.

Yeah, i guess it is somewhat of a paradigm that a tilesheet should be all of the same size and more complex shapes should then be created from more than a single tile. Hence all tile editors i know of work like this.

[punkonjunk]

You might want to look into PyxelEdit. http://pyxeledit.com/
You can make tilemaps and tiles in the same editor. It seems like something you might be interested in.
EDIT: you can also paint in the scene after you places tiles down. I find it helps a lot with making art.

Paint in the scene after you place tiles!
Thanks buddy!
Buying it now.

[punkonjunk]

I can't seem to edit my last posts at all.

So I emailed the guy who made lemmings DS, about his level editor, and how that works - he called them "stamps" and how you could take these stamps and make a brush with them, which is cool! As I dive more into this, I really like how responsive and helpful folks are in the independent gaming field. It's pretty excellent.
Anyhow, the tool he modeled his tools after was "deluxe paint" for the amiga. In 1985.
This tool allowed you to use these stamps as a brush.
After some more research and talking to one of the guys at my shop, photoshop has the ability to do this, to apparently take an object or a small thing and make it into a brush - that's exactly what I was describing. Apparently, you can also save these and manage them this way.
I'm starting on the game maker stuff now, and will look at how that handles tiles and assets, too, as it be pretty easy to just use that, but I'm not sure if it'll do what I want, it might boil down to drawing a screen at a time, or stitching an area using a bunch of brushes I draw. So.... I guess it's time to start dealing with photoshop.

I also drew a bunch more stuff:

I did idle and running animations for this little guy, but he drags his feet. (Can I force tigsource to render these bigger? =200x200 didn't work.)
We decided that was too small for our 480x270 screen size (exactly 1/4 1080p, close to SNES, looks nice, feels right!) so I went ahead and drew a slightly larger guy - I looked at the gifs for crawl and how they began animation, and they did colored line work. I just did colored blocks to seperate parts that move:

And got this to look pretty good.
So I started drawing a guy of that size, 48x48:

and then tried to animate him running and hit a wall.


I think he looks pretty good. couldn't decide on a vest or just muscles, but I think the bare skin will work well with the gib stuff we're gonna do... but this dude is a lot harder to draw and animate and work with. I assume my skills will improve over time.

I also drew this little spider mouth guy:


and this very long thing, I stretched the desert bit out to fit a series of much longer backgrounds:

because I wanted to draw more tiny sand buildings.


And I'd totally appreciate some feedback
(I know the spider guy looks crazy flat. doing the mock-3d movement is hard.)

[pixelrains]

You say you have no art background? This looks amazing!

[punkonjunk]

I used to to jewelry design and photo in highschool. that was it. I was very bad at painting and drawing, it never clicked.
Somehow this seems to

[punkonjunk]

Did some brick-stuff.
Starting in on game maker studio. Still not sure if I want to paint huge areas and plop them into GMS, or make assets and plop them onto backgrounds with gamemaker... getting started on that will help me figure out how I want to handle the art stuff.

[TitoOliveira]

Tiled will help you create tiled maps with much more ease. I'm not sure how it is on game maker, but on unity is a pain to place tile after tile.

[monsterfinger]

For sprites I tend to use Piskel which is a free online tool.

For drawing levels I make tiles in Piskel, then import them into the ClickFusion 2.5 editor and paint them onto the screen using the paint tool, equally for these kind of games I use a grid which is the same size as one tile and have all things snap to that grid.

[punkonjunk]

so after exhaustive research, and just a boatload of planning (I think I have 60 pages of crap, upgrades, basic idea, lore, all kinds of crap in OneNote) I learned a bunch of stuff - it should be really easy to tile, or paste in a drawing on top of a custom collision map, or tiled out collisions and make it fit perfect, which suits my (probably a little crazy) desire to not try to tile everything. I got the basic idea of how this is gonna work sorted out, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

I also drew some more stuff.

Most substantially:



And then, with eyeballs:


I wanted to try and draw some meat stuff. I'm not sure if the veiny stuff on the left has too much depth, or if on the right has too little. And the tentacles on the right side of the bone-thing, in the center, look bad. that one curling around the left prong looks cool though.

I had about 18 reference images blown up across my monitors while doing this, but I couldn't seem to just draw "flesh" like everything is an open wound, and I couldn't find a good example or anything similar to help me proceed at all.
The only thing I could think of was stage 4 of Super Ghouls and ghosts - while excellent, was pretty tiled. So I just kind of winged it, but I feel like it's halfway to an example of "pillowshading tentacles and pipes"

[TitoOliveira]

Binding of Isaac has a bunch of gory, meaty stuff you could use as reference.