Size? Palette? Bit more about the project it's for? Especially platform...

EDIT: Also do you want cliff edges or beaches?

Edited by Bcadren - 19 December 2014 at 8:33am

Battleships are left-right only?

Or need an up-down version as well?

It doesn't seem like that hard of a task, all would depend on qualities...And the battleship sprites with alpha or married to the sea tiles?

This sounds like a fun and quick project! I'd like to do it. I have no professional experience or a proper pixel art portfolio, but you can see some of my pixel work in my PJ profile, and here are a couple of samples from a game I did art for:
http://i.imgur.com/cKVOyd6.png
http://i.imgur.com/LekK46t.png
(Sorry for the text URLs, PJ refuses to let me make them into links, and I don't want to spam your thread with my images.)
The samples have a 24px tile size and maps generated automatically out of tiles based on a simple logical representation of each map (rather than being placed by hand by a level designer), which sounds fairly similar to what you're doing.

Do you have any sort of style/look in mind? Are you looking for something like your example (where tiling will be evident no matter what just due to the amount of detail), or something simpler like in Pokemon? Do you want "realistic" colours, or something more stylised?

By the way, if you want the beaches to be seamless and if there aren't limitations on the island shape that you haven't mentioned (e.g. that the islands are never +-shaped), you'll need more than 6 land tiles. I counted 9, and I might still be missing some. And that's at least 9 assuming they can be both flipped and rotated; depending on the style, there may need to be pre-rotated variants of tiles to make sure the texture doesn't look weird. I thought I'd bring that up just in case you pick an artist, pay them for 6 tiles, and end up surprised that the islands are missing beaches in some corners or have sideways grass xP

Your sample uses 8x8 tiles blown up 4x, are you looking for that kind of effect too, or do you want something that's natively 32x32?


Edited by eishiya - 19 December 2014 at 10:20am

I can work with either size, it's a simple enough style either way.

Your count is off a bit because you didn't account for the fact that the tiles have beaches that also have to remain continuous, so you don't get something like this:

The appropriate solution is to have tiles that have little beach-corners.

In making that schematic, I noticed my count of 9 is actually a mild under-estimate. Something using meta-tiles (having each "tile" actually made of 4 smaller tiles, so each island is never actually a single tile wide) might be an easier approach if you're generating the tilemaps automatically so that the code has fewer distinct cases to deal with and so that the tileset is smaller (and thus faster to download; you'd need only about 5 half-size tiles cover every possible case assuming rotation and flipping are possible, versus 12+ full-size tiles), but it would require having separate coordinate systems for your ships/logic and your terrain (logic coords = 0.5x terrain coords). However, if you're making the maps by hand, or need to keep the tilemap coordinates identical to your logical coordinates, then a larger set of tiles covering every possible case would be the more desirable option.


Edited by eishiya - 19 December 2014 at 11:01am

Ah, I see what you mean! In that case, I'm ok with inner land tiles having corners for beaches to reduce the total number of tiles. Taking the previous example, I imagine the result would look something like this: