Pixel art is tricky! Let’s analyze the graphics from some of the best titles from the past to discover new techniques.
Mega Man X3
Interestingly a lot of the tiles here use long, flat, horizontal lines.
There are some windows here which expose the parallax background effect and some search lights, so we can see some other background layers exposed through the window.
A lot of the backgrounds are also very flat, solid colors, with random cracks to break things up.
Even though a lot of the interior has simple backgrounds, some areas open up to very complex backgrounds with objects in them like these aircrafts where we can see some depth in the ceiling as well. In this case the background doesn’t appear tiled at all. For Unity this might be representable using a regular flat image even. Could also be interesting to mix vector background layers in with tile maps…
Tiles combine with the complex backgrounds later in the same level:
Another slightly busier background that appears on fairly flat colored and simple tiles. Some details added here are the computer screens and pipes, wires, lights, and tubes running up and down the walls.
Mega Man X
- X also has a lot of linearity. Lots of solid colors here for columns, gradients show roundedness of columns only near their edges.
- The ground has lots of geometry. Lines, squares, triangles, rectangles. They use colors to represent cutaways in the textures to make these straight lines and rectangles look more interesting.
- Given the futuristic motif of Mega Man the straight line geometry fits well.
So I gave it a shot creating my own Mega Man X style platforms:
It looks pretty good when tiled, I created this using Aseprite’s tiling mode:
In practice the part that represents the back wall/fence could maybe be part of a different tile that gets placed above this one since these will probably have collision on them, and the wall/fence should appear in the background.