Dungeon Tiles, Pack 1 Adept (Patreon)

Hello everyone! I wasn't too sure what to do for my alternate versions here, what with this week's map not being a map and all, and I decided that the only real option was to set up recolorings. Your alternate version is the 'Submerged' palette, a shadowy teal version that has the feel of being underwater! I like the thought of using this palette in addition to the regular version, perhaps some stairs lead down a side hallway and you transition to the submerged tiles. 

1. Designing the tiles mostly required looking up what other people have done and making sure I didn't forget something obvious like a 3 way intersection. Before that though I had to decide what kind of scale I would be working at, how big the hallways should be for the sake of consistency, and whether each tile would be the exact same size- 6x6. I liked the thought of uniformity, but I felt that it wasn't super necessary and would take away some customizability.  

2. The idea for these tiles is that each piece isn't unique enough that it would stand out if used multiple times. This meant that I wasn't able to add any large and easily-identifiable features in any particular tile. So essentially I was limited to basic walls and floor tiles and only enough detail to make it feel 'dungeon-y'. 

The other tricky thing I came across was the wall placement. In my typical maps I like to center walls on the gridlines, but apparently this a bad practice for tiles in Roll20. As long as I stay consistent throughout any further tiles I make in the future I don't see any problem with this, but I'm also half-expecting to hear about the various things I got wrong on my first attempt at tiles so maybe this will end up changing. 

3. One thing I hadn't thought of until I was too deep was keeping the shading consistent where the tiles meet- preventing sharp changes in lighting and color between tiles. I didn't test each tile against each other either (because I'm a one man operation), so maybe a couple of these don't work well, who knows.

I don't usually talk about this final part of mapmaking, but I was sure that rendering all these tiles out was going to be an absolute nightmare. For the sake of my workflow I didn't break each tile up into its own layers, which meant that I was going to have to crop each one separately and export each of the 7 different versions. With 39 tiles that meant exporting 273 files total. In order to streamline this I set up a separate PSD with each version flattened and merged into one layer per version, each named with the correct suffix, and from there I cropped the canvas down to each piece one at a time and exported all currently visible layers as PNGs, then finally adding in the correct tile number in the folder. Then I moved on to the next tile and did it again. I can't say this was the most fun thing I've made for Neutral Party.