Most NES RPG’s didn’t try too hard to hide the tile based nature of their graphics. In some of them, like Dragon Quest, it was quite obvious and it didn’t look that good, however, for Me and myself, like the sun and the moon I’m trying to add more variety to each tile set so things look more organic.
In Dragon Quest they didn’t even bother to use shadows (which give depth and volume to objects). You don’t need a grid to clearly distinguish each individual tile. Final Fantasy isn’t that much better.
If you look at the grass in both examples they only use 1 very simple tile for it. Me and myself…, in the other hand, will use 5 different textures for grass, each (but one) has 5 different tiles (top-left, top-right, center, bottom-left, bottom-right). That’s 21 different tiles just for grass!
Because of this, making the maps is taking a LOT of time, but hopefully, it will look very good in the end. In fact, I have to be cautious of not going overboard with the tile variety, as too much would probably not be possible on the NES and I want to somewhat stick to its limits. Still, I can’t deny I’m having a lot of fun building these maps, and I’m not far from being done.
My goal is to make this look better than any other tile based RPG on the NES!
Thanks for reading, as promised, here are some new screenshots, enjoy!: