Thanks!
What indicates to you that this place is really high up in the sky?
The cliffs give a strong illusion of depth. When I look at the center of this piece, it makes me feel like I am REALLY high up in the sky and I like that a lot. Keep going!
Totally digging the subtle animation in the water!
(and the grass and bush-trees)
Very nice, the tiles feel balanced and i enjoy the patterns you made. A relaxing atmosphere overall.
I only have small critiques: The stairs feel a little flat, I am expecting a bit of darker shadows between the cliff. As far as the perspective goes it doesn't really throw me off, but you might want to try and choose a 'light side' and 'darkside', or brighten the dirt tiles so I don't get lost.
Ah, I see. In both of those games, I don't recall encountering confusion with regard to that, because the bits that look "walkable" are so small compared to the character sprites that there's no question that the space isn't walkable. Having some non-walkable space that looks walkable but is obviously inaccessible is important to having organic forms in your environment. Without that, you'll end up with a blocky look - and you did. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if your goal is naturalistic scenery, then that's a sacrifice you'll have to make. It's the same principle that lets you have your trees look rounded even though the tiles are square - the tiles aren't walkable even though parts of them look like they should be, and players don't question it.
Wow! Just wow! Love the colours and tilesets you have created. Love the atmosphere, everything! Going to fave it and use it as reference!
I want the spaces you can walk into to be as clear as possible, and in those cliffs the edges are not very squarelike, which would make it feel frustrating when you run into "invisible" edges.
Fair enough?
I am curious though, why would they cause collision issues? Collision is per-tile in SoM (and also technically in MV, but they have an interesting movement system that makes it feel different to that).
While they do look very nice, the cliff tiles in Sword of Mana and Magical Vacation are a completely different look than what I am going for. The way they are shaped would also cause problems with the collision in the game engine I have to work with.
Generally the trick is to avoid "encoding" any specific slope in the tiles, instead focusing on features like individual rocks, and creating the slopes through tile placement. That way, you can vary the slope as needed.
In general, when doing any sort of "nature" tileset, it's best to avoid any straight lines. For examples of cliffs done well, check out Sword of Mana and Magical Vacation (especially the latter). Both of those games have a fundamentally vertical slope for their cliffs, but the games create the impression of other types of slopes just through clever placement of cliff and flat-terrain tiles.
Do you think you could make an example? I don't think I would be able to pull that off myself, since the cliffs need to be a very specific way in order to all match up properly.
Here's the tileset I have so far: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12694594/tileset.png
Also, I didn't mention in the description, but I made these tiles to be used in a game, and in that game there is only whole tile collision. (For example, I can't have an object that takes up half a tile or goes diagonally across a tile because then the collision couldn't match.)
The fact that all the cliffs are slanted (and at the same angle) makes it look like there's trippy perspective trickery going on. If that's not intentional, then I think breaking up the perfect corners on the rocks and adding some tiles for steeper/shallower slopes would help. Irregularity in general.
When I stare at the stairs and cliffs adjacent, in the center of the piece, it gives a strong illusion of depth/distance.