More small edits that will make your game look so much better

じ☆ve冰风

I expect no one to be a fully fledged artist, but even if you are not, there are many things you can do to make your maps look better. The edits we discuss here are all based on default RPG Maker MZ tiles but work the same way for other engines and styles.
So, what if we want to make a simple village map like this…



… look better with just a few tiny edits?

Door frames
Let’s face it: the doors always kinda stick out, inside or outside, they are the perfect size for a character, but not for a default 2 tile high wall and somehow they feel a little like stickers that were glued on the wall.
With a door frame you can not only make the door area higher than just that one tile, but also bind it more into the whole construction.
So for our example doors, we have a close look at the walls they are used on:



Both walls already have a framing element, one in the form of wooden beams and the other in form of bricks:



Now we can simply copy and paste these structures on a seaparate layer around the door frame to, well, frame it:



And here is how the layer looks without the base:



As you can see, we can reuse the shadow from the left beam to have our frame cast a shadow.

For rounded doors things are more complicated, so this will just be a short addition for those interested, just know that you need to be more invested to pull this off!
If we try our rectangle frames, we can see that they don’t really fit anymore:




We can still use them until the round part starts, and this is the part you usually have to draw from scratch or heavily edit, that pink bow up there:



You can use your frame materials as reference to color that area in, but how it is shaded is massively depending on the material you have:



You can use a shortcut and have a massive top that is just rounded at the bottom and therefore easier to shade or you can even go further and draw in more details as on the right…



… but for now, let’s go further and have a look at our example map!




Flora recolors
Drawing new flora is difficult and time intensive and it can be hard to make all the plants look like they form one biotop. But using the same few plants over and over can make a map look a little dull. This simple trick here is used by many people already and you can make it, too!



I love that MZ bushy tree and the lilac flower, but if we just use these, it looks a bit repetitive.

So we open Gimp and copy as many instances of our plants in there as we want to have as variation. I like to go with 2-3, to not have them take up too much space and since we have the base as well on the default sheets which already is another instance for that plant.



Now we can use select by color to “grab” the area we want to alter, for example the leafy part of the tree:



But watch out, you might accidentally select parts that you don’t want to edit in this step, as here on the flowers. With the rectangle selection and “subtract from selection” we can get rid of those.



I personally like to copy that parts I want to alter on a second layer, as now we can use box select to pick each crown and then use the sliders on hue/saturation to alter the color just a little to make them look different:



We then do the same for the flowers, here we might want to leave as they are and just alter the petals:



And there we go:




Tip: Make color variations on plant leaves be subtle, they shall be visible but should not massively stand out. They are supposed to be a variation of a background piece to make it more interesting, not a centerpiece the player shall look at all the time.

The odd tile
Repeating patterns and seamlessly looping tiles are a key point when filling up a map, but it can also lead to a little bit of boredom.
Let’s take the roofs for example. Not all shingles are the same colors, but the pattern they are in repeats over and over.
So, let’s take a snippet of the roof and look what we can do:



Now we can add a layer on top and copy and paste some darker shingles into areas where lighter ones are and vice versa. Such tile could look like this:



and while the impact might not be massive, it already adds some nice variation while seamlessly fitting in:



(left default, right with the added variation tile on top).
We can also go even further: shingles can move and go missing, or crack. Adding that to the autotile would be a little weird, as there would be dozens of odd shingles in a pattern on that roof, but making those small variation tiles allows us to add them as little highlights.



So for example, we can use the color of the line that divides those two shingles and draw a new line where the edge is chipped off. With another dark color we imply a gap and on the same stage, we can also expand the shingle that lies below the chipped one a tiny bit.
There are just very few pixels altered, but the difference is massive:



on the right you can see how it is just a tiny variation in the pattern, while on the right it becomes an annoyance due to being on every tile.



The same goes for tilted or moved tiles.

Tip: if your layer has just the tiles that are altered, you can place them on the position you want and not only on the specific tile you place it on:






This does not only apply to shingles, a little variation can break up all your tiling textures like walls or cliffs as well!
And those are 3 more things you can do when you have a few minutes and want to up your game graphics no matter how skilled you are!
Remember that you can still de-shoebox the houses and make the window frames match the other wooden parts!





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