Pixel Art - Architecture Foundations
A Feature by DJ Fenix
This tutorial won't touch too much on the actual drawing part--this is more concepts and, to a certain degree, rules.
This is kind of a little tidbit that bugs me in a lot of games (not limited to OHR games, but mostly indie). A lot of map designers tend to ignore the basic structure of a house altogether when piecing a map. Therefore, I think it's important to cover this before we move on.
Now, suppose I have a plot of land that I wish to build a house on. Not necessarily just in games, but in life as well. Where would I start? Why, with the foundations, of course. Now, in RPG making, we're not actually going to draw out the foundations, but we're at least going to lay out our foundations to let us know where we want to build our building.
That big ugly pink block there is where I'm going to lay out my building---a 7x3 chunk of land to be the foundations. The area of the foundation would also be the same as the area of the roof-to-be.
As I mentioned, the size of the roof should be the same as the size of the foundations. I think it fairly common sense, but from the foundations, the building goes up vertically, and unless there's some protruding sides on your building, the roof should have the exact same area. With that in mind, the wallmap should also reflect this.
As you can see, the foundation that we laid out is also where the hero cannot walk through. Everything else should be an overhead tile. It's fairly common that we see some sort of awkward wallmap like this:
Which just doesn't work...
And suppose you have different elevated levels on your building?
Honestly, that doesn't even matter, because you still have the exact same foundation.
You could change the size and shape of the foundation, and you'd still need to apply the same rules:
That's all I have for now for this mini-tutorial. Next month, I'll get into more of the meatier stuff of drawing and different architectural styles and such.