The bench of doom - what went wrong and how can I tackle it instead?

じ☆ve冰风

I lately had the urge to open my - of course - never finished very first game project I made with RMXP. Since the resource situation was a little bit different back then - I remember collecting resources as much as I could in the computer science class at school on an USB stick and Rips and not credited stuff was everywhere - the overall situation was a little bit different than today.

But I knew how to help myself and edited and made a lot of things without any basic previous knowledge to my best effort, and well, that is how the results looked like. Also a lot of my earlier resources also suffered from similar issues.

And while I wouldn’t recommend anyone using them today, I want to use the opportunity to use them as a bad example for certain techniques.

NOTE: I will make my remakes with RMMZ resources and proportions so more people nowadays can actually use them. The general issues are not maker bound anyways - what I did wrong would be wrong in every maker ;3 Unless you aim for a really different and purposefully crappy style, you should avoid the stuff I am talking about here!

If you do or did any of these things, that is not a personal attack! Any effort is great, and you are amazing for trying!





What still works:
-the general structure is okay

What I could have made different:
1. As you can see by the Arshes I added to the picture, the bench is out of proportion for any character to be able to sit on it.




2.the texture is horrible and there is no shading at all, plus the colors do not really fit the default tiles as well.



3.This bench never had a shadow. No detail image, cause there is nothing to see xD

How can I approach something similar with today's knowledge?

- Always add a character for size reference if the item needs to be in proportion. If in doubt, look for a resource that serves a similar purpose.




If there is a chance and you are not proficient yet, there is no shame in editing your resource from existing material. This will help to make the resource look fitting in style and shading. Here we have a bench made out of a trunk that has been cut in half, the backrest seems to be made that way, too. So I need those, and I need them in different angles, one for the seating part, one for the back.




Since I made my remake with MZ, those interior autotiles look just like what I need. One has the “cut open” part, the other has the slightly rindy round full trunk.
Bonus: the stilts on the side will serve great for the other parts of the bench!
And they are even shaded:



I have the cut parts facing front and up and since the wood is round I have both angles!
So since I basically have everything I need, I can now assemble them with my old bench and the chair I picked as reference.



For the seating area all I need is the board that faces up and the lower part of the trunk. Since I got them from an autotile they already tile and therefore I can very easily get them to the proportions I needed. With a slight light adjustment on the top (you see the little highlight on the left of the seating area) that part is done. And since all things I used were already the right angle and style before, there is no extra work here.

So I do the same for the back:



Now for that angle all I need is the missing legs and the connection between back and seating area.



With the stilts from the autotile that are also already facing the right direction. As you can see, starting from the one on the left, I first carefully cut and pasted it to make it thinner and then cut out the short piece I needed. With the darker colors I carefully added a shadow on the top, since in both places where I needed it there is something that casts one from the top.
And that it is for the front. And for the side, I can basically use the same materials and ideas plus the finished front as reference.

I marked the only missing half round shape in my bench with a green placeholder for now. Don’t be shy to make such stand ins at times. If you are in the workflow it can help a lot to put stand-ins where you don’t know exactly what to do, that way you can finish the piece and just come back to the problem area later:



As you can see, that way I could already “wrap” my backrest around the missing spot and progress, and the solid green area will be easy to select as one and swap out later.



Remember that you cannot just mirror objects if you want both sideview versions, as light and shadow will work differently. As you can see, while the layout is mirrored, the seating area is not mirrored, and the right backrest is darker than the left one!




The backrest only casts a shadow on the left side, that is why I used the box selection and lowered the brightness next to the backrest on the seating area. I also removed the “light” strip on the left before by copy and pasting another 1px wide part of the bench over it.
With the other wood already existing, I built the remaining framework to hold the bench together. Besides the placeholders, that is already very close to a final resource.




And while the perfect piece I can edit in does not exist as is, there is the tree trunk on the outside map. With some careful editing and recoloring it could work here, or I can use it as a reference.

Since this is not a very easy thing to do, here are my tips:
-there is no shame in trying and not getting it right the first time.
-if you tried and it does not look as you wish, you can still ask for guidance. Then either someone helps you just to get the right look or maybe they can offer advice where you went wrong and how to fix it. And while the first is more convenient, the second will probably help you further, since next time you know how to handle such a case.




I personally went to make that area from scratch here. With the trunk as reference and the side facing wood as a color guide, I just played around until I was satisfied.

Now that I am nearly done it is time to put everything onto one sheet and see if there was anything left to fix:



I made 1 tile wide versions of each bench as well so they could serve as chairs and also adjusted some pixels and the width of the front bench, so that the 1 tile wide chair was not too wide for my taste.
With all that done, all I need to do is to add shadows:



There we go!
Besides the one tricky part, there was nothing done that a beginner technically can’t do - a lot of copy and paste, some box selection,some moving and turning… but the important part is to understand resources, and that is something that you will only do if you actually work with them and look at them.

So here for my comparison:





本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Avery处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/the-bench-of-doom-what-went-wrong-and-how-can-i-tackle-it-instead.157901/